Maxim's Felix Dennis on the real fear of failure (#42)

The late billionaire explains the #1 reason you won't become rich

What’s the number one reason people don’t get rich?

According to the late British billionaire, Felix Dennis, it’s because of their fear of failure.

But, as Dennis explains in his book, How To Get Rich: One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets, it’s not fear of failure for the reason most people think. It’s a very particular reason, and most people either fail to recognize it, or deal with it.

In this OGT, Dennis reveals this particular fear, and gives some advice on how to get past it. How to “harness it.”

Even if you’re goal is not to be rich, reading this Think will help you with one of the big fears holding you back from taking risks.

We’ll start at step #1: recognize it.

Why You’re Actually Afraid To Fail

Knowing that fear of failure is holding you back is a step in the right direction. But it isn’t enough, because knowing isn’t doing…

In essence, it comprises two components. The first is our natural desire to avoid letting ourselves or others down, perhaps with calamitous financial repercussions. The second is the exposure of that failure to the outside world.

The first of these—fear of letting ourselves or others down—Dennis says, may be a sham. Or if it’s real, it’s not as weighty as it seems:

Firstly, letting others or yourself down and the consequent financial calamity.

My response is: so what? You may let others down if you act. You may let yourself down if you do not act. And just how calamitous will utter failure prove to be, in any case? Which, of course, is what gives the young and penniless such a huge advantage in the race to get rich. They instinctively know what Bob Dylan preached forty years ago: “When you got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.”

… How great is the sacrifice in reality, as opposed to your nightmarish fears at 3 o’clock in the morning? Does such a venture really risk utter destitution? Or is it (far, far more likely) that you fear the embarrassment of failure more than the possible financial penalty.

Dennis says that people can usually do away with this fear of destitution by raising practical questions like the ones above. What Tim Ferriss has called “Fear Setting”¹—How bad can it be, really?

Then he moves on to the much more powerful fear—that of public shame:

This nastier, stickier second component, the “broadcasting” of our misjudgements or errors to the rest of the world, and especially to our peers, is often the nub of the matter…

…[the] decision [won’t] involve utter financial ruin, either way. But fear of attempting something, the result of which cannot be easily hidden, weighs heavily in the balance, whether we are aware of it or not. This applies not only to getting rich, but to almost all business and career-related decisions. And, perhaps, to the majority of all important decisions we make in our lives.

So how to you get past this fear?

In an answer that reminds me of Sylvester Stallone’s idea that you need to grow an “alligator hide,” Dennis says, if you want to take risks (which Dennis says, you must if you want to be rich), you need to grow a “mental armor”:

…if you wish to be rich, you must grow a carapace.² A mental armor. Not so thick as to blind you to well-constructed criticism and advice, especially from those you trust. Nor so thick as to cut you off from friends and family. But thick enough to shrug off the inevitable sniggering and malicious mockery that will follow your inevitable failures, not to mention the poorly hidden envy that will accompany your eventual success. Few things in life are certain except death and being taxed. But sniggering and mockery prior to any attempt to better yourself financially, followed by envy later, or gloating during your initial failures—these are three certainties in life. It hurts. It’s mindless. And it doesn’t mean anything. But it will happen. Be prepared to shrug it off.

Dennis ends this chapter on the fear of failure—which in and of itself is worth the price of the book—with a little advice on how to “harness” it:

If the fear of failure is holding you back—and it almost certainly is—then what strategies can be devised to set you free?

Here is my suggestion. Think of this fear not as the King Kong of bogeymen, but as a mare. A nightmare. A mare, after all, is a horse. A horse can be tamed, bridled, saddled, harnessed and (eventually) ridden.

Harnessing the power of such a creature adds mightily to your own. Thus the nightmare of prospective failure provides you with the very opportunity you are seeking. Not only does it restrain smarter people than yourself from becoming rich—and there can only be so many rich people in the world—it affords you the chance of increasing your confidence, both when you confront it and when you master it. For make no mistake, if you will not confront and harness this all-too -human emotion in one way or another, then you are doomed to remain relatively poor. You either get over it, go around it, go at it, mount it, duck under it or cozy up to it. But you cannot surrender to it. That way lies paralysis, prevarication, ignominy and defeat.

After a lifetime of making money and observing better men and women than I fall by the wayside, I am convinced that fear of failing in the eyes of the world is the single biggest impediment to amassing wealth.

Trust me on this. If you shy away for any reason whatever, then the way is blocked. The gate is shut—and will remain shut. You will never get started.

You will never get rich.

The OGT: Is it the failure or the exposure of it?

When I ran Dennis’ words through my experiences of not taking risks that I think I should have, it checks out. There was the fear of being judged. The fear of public shame.

Dennis is not alone in this realization:

• “Whenever I’m faced with a difficult decision, I ask myself: What would I do if I weren’t afraid of making a mistake, feeling rejected, looking foolish, or being alone?” Oprah wrote.

• “Don’t worry about popular opinion,” F. Scott Fitzgerald told his daughter. “Don’t worry about failure, unless it comes from your own fault.”

• “If you are insecure,” wrote Tim Ferriss, “guess what? The rest of the world is, too.”

What’s holding you back from making that change or taking that risk? Is it fear of it not working? Or is about what other people will think?

Whatever your fear, I’m inspired by Dennis’ claim: “it affords you the chance of increasing your confidence, both when you confront it and when you master it”

So confront it.

1. If this is a real fear, I suggest you follow Tim’s exercise. It’s a good one.

2. Had to look this up too: “the hard upper shell of a turtle”