Success Without Fear

What is possible?  What is not?  Just how you answer these questions is more important than any other factor in determining whether or not you will be successful in business or in life. It seems obvious, doesn't it?  Yet how many of us CONSTANTLY reexamine our beliefs in terms of these two questions?  In the mind of someone prepared to be successful the answers are elegantly simple.  For the former, the answer is everything and for the later, the answer is nothing. The beliefs that color our platitudes are not hard wired into our consciousnesses.  They are built up over time.  Most often they are the result of the fear of failure.  That fear is usually the impetus for excess caution or over qualifying of prerequisites.  We can sometimes fail by planning.  If we wish to be EMPOWERED, we must adopt beliefs that endorse and affirm that EMPOWERMENT.  Being timid is contrary to the very quintessence of success. We have a language that in describing timidity, contains no derth of negative adjectives.  Pusillanimous, spineless, yellow, chicken livered, gutless, mousey and even worse words communicate our inherent disdain and contempt for the timid. Our "Heroes" are all the opposite.  They are brave.  In almost all regards (with the exception of necessary sacrifice) our "Heroes" are successes!  Our same language contains an abundance of positive adjectives for describing bravery.  Couragous, intrepid, lion hearted, bold, dauntless and audacious are the smallest sample of our descriptives of Bravery. So how do so many of us come to this place where we live in and operate our businesses or careers in fear?  We have been conditioned to perceive all loss as failure.  In fact in the metric we establish for measuring our success we often cannot differentiate failure from loss.  In an honest regard of most of our practices we tend to view the loss/reward equation at the end of the research cycle, rather than the long term potential for profit and growth as the sole metric for success.  In the current crisis being experienced in our Automobile manufacturing sector, the proposed electric vehicles due in 2010 through 2013 are not expected to offer less than the operating costs to the consumer, of the GM EV1. "Wiser Heads" at General Motors "determned" that the EV1's (produced in small demonstration lots) cost per unit x distance between recharges x cost of electricity = an unsaleable product.  In truth the economies of scale created by full scale production, would have in a short time reduced the cost per unit sufficiently to produce a different equation; much more appealing to the car buying public. Worse of all they didn't include in their deliberations that the initial cost of research and creating a production stream would amortize during the first 4 years of the genre and afterwards as they enhanced and expanded the genre the cost of additional products would have been at a higher profit profile.  All of these presumptions were influenced by the fear of another failure.  Detroit had experienced its own "Viet Nam" in models like the Edsel, Corvair, and the K Car. I chose to illustrate these principles using GM because of the constituency here on Biznik.  The truth is that many of us are equally timid and over cautious in our own operations.  Few of us are prepared to exercise decisions based upon a longer ranged perspective.  How many of you reading this article have even a 3 year plan that is concrete?  Even fewer have a 7 year or 10 year plan. We support our timidity by telling ourselves platitudes like, "no one can see that far in the future" and "I'm just trying to build a model that I can sell to a larger concern" or "see profit, take profit."  Each one of these ideas is based in the fear that what was successful today may fail tomorrow and we will lose the profit we could have taken out. Yet we know the credo of the Hero.  We know cliches like "no pain, no gain" and "no risks, no rewards."  Now it is time to learn the new maxim, "no fear, no failure" or as I close all of my communications; "Success without Fear."             2009-01-04T09:52:45Z

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success-without-fear

2009-01-07T18:02:43Z

I conclude all my correspondence with the phrase, "Success without Fear!" Rather than a Banality it's a prescription for unlimited potential. This article begins the exploration of how fear shapes our mental landscape and prevents our Triumphs.

Success Without Fear

2009-02-24T09:48:15Z