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Editor's note: Today, we're sharing timeless wisdom from our friend and colleague Mark Ford. Mark is one of the country's foremost experts on wealth building. He's a serial entrepreneur and New York Times best-selling author who has built hundreds of businesses. Below, he shares a simple plan that can change your life and defeat the fear of failure. It worked for him, and it can work for you, too...
Four Easy Steps to Banish Fear and Change Your Life, TodayBy
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
I used to dread the thought of public speaking. And when I was forced to make a speech, I did a terrible job – which only made me dread the next speech even more. It was a vicious cycle.
When I became the editorial director of a newsletter business in South Florida in 1982, I found myself in an uncomfortable position... I had to conduct meetings and give presentations at industry functions on a fairly regular basis – something I was ill-prepared to do.
So, I decided to enroll in a Dale Carnegie program for public speaking. Somehow, I registered for the wrong course. Instead of focusing on speech-making, it had a broader goal.
And that program changed my life.
It taught me the importance of setting goals and taking action. But it also taught me to be more comfortable as a speaker.
My speech-making skills improved almost accidentally.
Every week, we had to read a chapter of Carnegie's classic book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and then make a two-minute in-class presentation about how we were going to put the principle of that chapter to work in our lives.
On Thursday evenings after work, I would drive a half-hour to the meeting place.
During that drive, I thought about what I was going to say. It was difficult in the beginning, but it got a little easier each week. By the end of the 14-week course, I was performing at a near-professional level. I had won several awards in competitions and was routinely rated at the top of the class.
The final session was a sort of commencement ceremony. Relatives and friends were allowed to attend, which tripled the size of the audience we had to speak to. I gave the last speech. I was still a little nervous when I got up to the podium, but I'd learned a lot by then.
So, I took a deep breath and did my thing. I got a strong round of applause. Several people I didn't even know came up to congratulate me... and one suggested I should become a comedian.
I wasn't foolish enough to take his advice to heart, but it did make me happy to think I had made so much progress in so little time, starting from practically zero.
How did I conquer my fear of public speaking?
The same way you would conquer the fear of anything else.
Humiliation and Humility
A big part of what we are afraid of is embarrassment – being shamed in front of other people. When embarrassment is extreme, we call it humiliation.
If you pass gas at a fancy dinner party, you feel embarrassed. If your big project at work fails miserably – and you've been bragging it would be a "sure thing" – you feel humiliated.
Humiliation is what happens to embarrassment when it's mixed with pride. The prouder you are, the more failure hurts.
Which brings us to our cure for the fear of failure: humility.
I'm guilty of priding myself. I'm proud of my writing, for example, and the success I've had in business. So, I have to keep reminding myself to be humble about those things.
But I'm not proud of everything I do.
I take no pride in my ability to dance, sing, or speak foreign languages because I do those things so badly. And because my ego isn't involved, I'm not embarrassed to ask stupid questions, to show myself as a beginner, and, ultimately, to fail again and again as I attempt to master those skills.
The truth is, when I started out in business, I wasn't very good at that, either.
Again, that made it possible for me to ask lots of questions, look stupid, and make mistakes... which accelerated my learning curve.
That last observation brings us to an important principle of success. I call it "the secret of accelerated failure." It's a principle I developed in the early 1990s.
The principle of accelerated failure is this: To develop any complex skill, you must be willing to make mistakes and endure failures. The faster you can make those mistakes and suffer those failures, the quicker you will master the skill.
At the Palm Beach Research Group, we teach this secret to our managers.
We encourage them to allow their employees to fail. Not to fail stupidly. Not to make the same mistakes over and over again. But to feel free to fail at something – so long as it was done in the pursuit of knowledge.
If you play golf or practice Brazilian jiu-jitsu, you know this to be true: If you tense up and focus on avoiding mistakes, you will learn very slowly. If you relax, let the mistakes happen, and learn from them, you will advance quickly.
It starts with being humble. Humble enough to accept the fact that when you begin anything new, you're likely to do it poorly.
Humility Is Nature's First Gift
Pride prevents us from admitting we are incompetent. But we're all incompetent when we're learning.
Think of how a baby learns to walk. He begins by crawling, then advances to "forward falling" (as my brother calls it), then to walking like a little drunkard, and then, finally, to walking masterfully.
Babies don't feel shame, because they're not proud.
There's a reason pride doesn't invade the human psyche until 6 or 7 years of age: There's simply too much to learn before then.
If toddlers had pride, it would take them years – or even decades – to walk and talk properly.
Humility is a much-underrated virtue. It provides us with at least three significant advantages:
If Humility Is the Solution, How Does a Proud Person Become Humble? Now we are coming to the most important part of this discussion – a practical plan for defeating the fear of failure.
Here's how you can do it:
Defeat your fear of failure by being happy – and even eager – to try and fail until you succeed. That's how Edison invented the lightbulb. That's how Michael Jordan, a very mediocre basketball player in high school, became the greatest hoops player of all time.
They weren't afraid of failure.
You shouldn't be, either.
Regards,
Mark Ford
Further Reading:
You can read other classic wealth-building essays from Mark right here:
Market NotesGOPRO HEADS LOWER ONCE AGAIN Today's chart shows more bad news for GoPro...
Last year, we wrote a bearish note on GoPro, the innovative video-camera company. GoPro makes durable cameras you can attach to a helmet, car, surfboard, drone, or really any object, to record a video. If you've seen a first-person video of someone driving, skydiving, skiing, etc., it was likely filmed with a GoPro camera.
The problem is, GoPro is selling small cameras that aren't difficult to replicate. There's no barrier to entry. Any large technology company with billions of dollars in the bank could easily build a similar product. In fact, last year, Panasonic launched its own version, called the HX-A500.
As you can see below, the market has started to sour on GoPro. The company's stock has plummeted recently. After rallying earlier in the year, shares have fallen more than 40% over the past month... and just touched a new 52-week low. The company makes an exciting product... but it's vulnerable to cutthroat competition. And that makes it a dangerous stock to hold.
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