Megalomania, imposter phenomenon and the fear of failure. Or, why the barrow boy went missing

I wrote a few weeks ago about how, in my opinion, trucker Edward Stobart was driven by fear of failure. His determination to be judged by his spotless and ubiquitous trucks, and his shyness when dealing with people, all said to me that here was a man with fear-based insecurities.

Yet fear of failure can also drive bad behaviour. In fact, it can turn us into criminals. Such can be the mental terror of low achievement that – instead of indulging in avoidance tactics (as with Stobart and his reluctance to meet people) – we go full-throttle in the other direction, eventually (but wilfully) crossing the line with respect to acceptable behaviour. Even here, however, it may be possible to, in fact, see a person so desperate not to fail, or so desperate to be accepted, that they’ve made calamitous choices that can be explained by frustration or perceived (or real) prejudice or lack of opportunity.

This can certainly be the case when examining those that break the law in order to cover up their failures. Seen through the lens of fear of failure, some obviously criminal acts become more understandable, even if not more justifiable. Two cases stand out for me, perhaps because of my background in finance. In the UK there’s Nick Leeson, the “rogue trader” that brought down Barings, and in the US there’s Bernie Madoff, the daddy of all Ponzi schemers.

Leeson brought the venerable Barings Bank to its knees in 1995 due to a series of failed bets on Japanese equities. Rather than declare his equity derivatives losses, and confess his failure, Leeson set up a series of secret accounts to hide the losses. Meanwhile, he furiously tried to gamble them away – a tactic that can, and did, spiral out of control. The bank collapsed after Leeson’s bets crumbled in the dust of the Kobe earthquake in January 1995.

In Rogue Trader, Leeson’s own account of his actions, he claimed no malicious or criminal intent, and I believe him. He was a state-educated lower middle-class lad from Watford working for a posh bank in a senior and trusted role (as one memo from a board member famously stated: “he knows what he’s doing”). There was a clear touch of “imposter phenomenon” about him, where (in his head) his strong performances counted for nothing because he was not of the right stock.

Indeed, when the losses were uncovered and he went briefly into hiding, one of the directors revealed that Leeson’s assumptions regarding snobbery were not so far off. “One of our barrow boys has gone missing,” he declared, which at least did me the service of not having to invest any sympathy for a bank that had so little understanding of the motivations of its employees.

And, in my opinion, it was this insecurity that drove Leeson to criminality. He never intended stealing the money. His aim was to make money for his employers and thus prove his worth. He was also concerned for his team, and the blame that may be apportioned to them. Yet fear of failure destroyed his judgement – resulting in the hidden losses, the collapsed bank and his arrest and imprisonment.

The US example is more controversial because his crime is greater, the victims true innocents and it is more recent – indeed the corpse is still warm on this one. My evidence for Bernie Madoff’s fear of failure comes from the Wizard of Lies by Diana Henriques, who covered the collapse of his US$50 billion Ponzi scheme for the New York Times. Like Leeson, Madoff grew up in a lower-middle class neighbourhood on the edge of the metropolis – this time in Queens, New York. His father’s business ventures usually failed, which created a great impression upon the young Bernard. At all costs he wanted to succeed – and was determined to avoid the negative judgement from others that was the fate of his father.

This led him towards his first fraud – when managing money for around 20 clients. Trying for higher returns to please sceptical investors, he lost money on risky stocks. Yet rather than own up, he borrowed US$30,000 to erase the losses for his clients, allowing him to impress them with the brilliance of his money management. In Madoff’s mind he had done the honourable thing – taking the hit but covering his losses. Of course, the loan was repaid from renewed investment on the back of his enhanced reputation. And the pyramid developed its all-important second layer.

That was in 1962. After the 1987 stockmarket crash he found himself in a similar position and, again, used new investor’s cash to cover the losses and, again, to maintain his strong name. The pattern was repeated again in 2001-02. Indeed, only the scale of the redemptions from the 2008 crash prevented his flawed model from surviving the latest bear market, although by then the losses were vast. Indeed, he was nearly wiped out in 2005 when he managed to raise US$92 million with just three days to spare.

According to Henriques, Madoff always saw himself as an outsider and was determined to over-compensate. He served as chairman of NASDAQ and was on the board of governors from the National Association of Securities Dealers. He even gave office space to the regulator’s legal team when they had to abandon their home after 9/11. Some have put this down to the criminal mastermind, conducting grand fraud under the noses of the authorities. But, as a High-FF (someone with a high fear of failure) I think I can spot an alternative motive. I think it reveals an insecurity – of a man desperate to be accepted as an insider in a world he admired but was not part of.

He was determined to succeed where his father failed, so he had zero tolerance for failure. Failure, to Madoff, was not feedback or a temporary setback. It was condemning, a confirmation of his irretrievable and final awfulness. And this allowed his unethical behaviour (which was to hide his failings) to build to destructive levels. In his head he knew this, of course, but – in my view – he never viewed himself as a criminal, just as an outsider.

Henriques is perplexed by Madoff despite her deep research. She finds his criminality difficult to fathom – citing an interview in jail in which he complains about feeling “burned” by investors withdrawing their money in the 1987 cash. “I was hung out to dry,” he claimed – a mentality that Henriques struggles to explain although is absolutely clear to me, as a self-declared High-FF. It is typical of the extreme High-FF to blame his victims for his misfortune (assuming they were never on his side), not dissimilar to Hitler’s bunker denunciations of the German people. These are usually the very people the megalomaniac High-FF envied and emulated: the posh, the rich, the Aryans. He has spent his life trying to be deemed worthy of this group – sometimes going to ridiculous extremes in order to do so. And, ultimately, they have been the very people that have castigated or rejected him, or simply let him down.

When I lived in New York I often passed Madoff’s Midtown building – a preposterously ugly tower in brown marble called the Lipstick Building. I didn’t know who occupied it but I used to joke to friends that – whoever it was – they were trying way too hard to make an impression. It really does stand out from the skyscraper crowd for all the wrong reasons (and is also one of two blocks in the wrong place). When I heard it was Madoff’s, I was delighted. There was a building that was desperate to be an icon – yet it inwardly knew it was ugly and never likely to be accepted as a New York landmark: not so far removed from the man himself.

Religion, faith and talking to grown ups

Our youngest son was Christened recently. It was in a sweet village chapel in Suffolk where my immediate family, and those of the godparents, made up three-quarters of the attendees that Sunday. Yet the event got me thinking about faith and religion – and I ended up with a positive view, though initially more of religion than faith.

Faith is a very personal thing but my mind is just too rational – at least these days – to find room for ancient parables that read like an early form of social instruction. Rather, my positive view is of formalised religion and, indeed, its healthy influence with respect to socialisation.

Certainly, religion is probably the most successful socialising force ever invented. And this may have been my problem with it when younger. As I’ve written before, rebelliousness is often a mask for fear of failure – with the “failure” in many instances being social. There are expectations we are supposed to meet – social and material – and it is these that form the benchmarks for our lives. So if we rail against those expectations, it may be that the rebellion hides a deeply-hidden (even denied) fear of falling short.

With respect to my early academic and career mishaps, this is patently true. My rebellion masked a deeply-held belief regarding my inadequacies. Yet this is also true socially – inwardly, I felt alienated from the community around me. So I may have, again, been rejecting society before it could reject me.

And I think religion played a significant part in this, although it wasn’t until I had to engage the vicar in correspondence regarding my faith – as part of the process for persuading him that we could invade his small but reflective Sunday worship to get the youngest sorted – that I realised the role religion played.

My family were agnostics – at least they would have been if they’d examined their relationship with God, which they didn’t (agnostic agnostics perhaps). Indeed, right through my life I’ve seen religion as something other people “get” or “have” or “did”. Meanwhile, I’d never been consulted – at least not until the moment the vicar asked me for my view on faith.

On reflection I regret this inherited agnosticism – not the spiritual or faith element but the resultant absence from any form of involvement in the most obvious totem of community life. Many of my school friends attended church – mostly reluctantly. Yet I now see what it brought them: community involvement, integration, acceptance, behavioural norms and grown-up codes of conduct.

I could also add discipline here, although that makes me sound reactionary, and I’m not. But it did encourage an adult discourse, imparting skills on “how” to communicate with adults, which would surely have a beneficial influence on whether we wanted such a communication.

Meanwhile, I never learned these simple skills, which meant the village adults viewed me as sullen, stroppy, and poorly socialised. They treated me with suspicion. So I acted suspiciously. It was self-fulfilling.

It was clearly a major hole in my community life and one that was deeply felt, although one I can only now articulate. My church-going mates knew people (grown ups) and were liked by them. I was an outsider in my own village. Religion created a powerful sense of cohesion that was apparent for both those on the inside, and those on the outside. It gave those kids boundaries that I didn’t have. And, yes, that included the values of the bible as much as it meant community activity.

Instead, I went the other way – cheeking the grown-ups, leading the other kids towards petty vandalism and shoplifting (true I’m afraid – I was the 10-year old leader of the shoplifting gang). And this led me down a path of being disliked and distrusted by those adults in the village that were part of the community. Of course, this had implications for who I could hang around with. Eventually I was banned from some houses, compounding the alienation. It also had implications at school – not least because many of the teachers lived locally and were plugged into the village scene. Their attitude towards my behaviour, and my work, became noticeably harder as I moved up the years.

Unfortunately, I think society has moved more in my direction. I suspect there are a lot more Robert Kelseys in my “village” (actually a suburb of Chelmsford in Essex) than there were in my day. And society is a lot poorer for it (this isn’t a right-wing rant, by the way, more a sadness at our lost cohesion).

I told the vicar all this in our Christening preamble and he was impressed, but thought I’d missed the point. What about faith, he asked? As far as he was concerned, I was talking about religion as seen through the eyes of an amateur (and atheistic) sociologist. Where’s the spirituality?

I was lost for a reply on this one. But then I remembered going to his service a year-or-so ago. He is married to my wife’s cousin and we were staying with them for the weekend – so it was only good manners to attend his Sunday sermon. I thought it would only be an hour and we’d just have to cope with the boring rituals and distracted kids.

But I found myself deeply moved by his service. I sat there in this ancient environment (surrounded by some pretty ancient people) and absorbed his words regarding love and reflection. Work was pretty taxing at this point, I remember, and he reminded me that I had to appreciate those closest, not view them as a barrier. His message was simple, it made biblical references, and it was sandwiched between a hymn and a prayer – but it also hit the nail on the head when it came to my current stresses. I realise this isn't exactly faith - but it is surely spiritual, which maybe as close as I can get.

Sure, as a kid such words would have had less impact. We need to grow up before we can appreciate any form of reflection. But it would have been nice to have known they existed. Just maybe I’d have wasted less energy trying to reject the world around me before – in my mind – they could reject me.

The darkest hour . . .

Songs transport us back to our past more efficiently than any other stimulation (though smells come a well-placed second). The power of a three-minute tune to bring back time and place with incredible clarity is extraordinary. Emotions also return, almost as strongly as the original experience – although now with the bitter-sweet icing of the retrospective view.

I thought this as I listened to Transfatty Acid by Lamb – the opening line of which is “no one said it would be easy” – a statement intended to conjure the trials of past eras. I used to listen to the song as part of a Café del Mar compilation around the turn of the millennium. Yet one occasion stands out, of me sitting alone in my small flat in North London – half-cut after several cans of Stella.

I’d never intended living there. It was an investment property while in the US. But there I sat, after being thrown out of a shared house in Camden, with a string of failed relationships behind me and the foolishness of my recent career choices starkly apparent.

To top it all, 10-years of non-smoking had recently been thrown away and I sat there puffing on Marlboro Lights, a brand that hadn’t even existed in my smoking youth. It felt that the past few years of giddy excess had finally crashed around me as I watched the fog build up under the ceiling and cracked another can – probably nodding just a little too deeply to Lamb’s song of suffering and endeavour.

Did I cry? I can’t remember. Probably – why not go all the way? In fact, I can remember a thrown glass around that time. Oh yeah, I was determined to indulge in all of misery’s thin pleasures.

Yet the reminder – due to setting the iPod to random while preparing dinner for my lovely and loving wife and wonderful (though occasionally naughty) boys in our beautiful home (there’s a point to this – don’t worry) – was, indeed, a bitter-sweet retrospective. Because I could now look back at that moment – the filling ashtray, the tired furniture, the solitude of failure – and realise that it was the darkest moment. I think it was deep winter (I’d left the Camden house in December, so my guess was that it was January, hardly a cheery month). In early February I took a friend on a nightout. She’d never been to The Cross – the famous nightclub behind King’s Cross station – so I promised to take her. We got on, we kissed, we started dating. I fell in love.

That summer was wonderful, and my small flat – in fact the top-floor of a small tower with unbroken views over Clissold Park – proved perfect for developing a grown-up relationship away from the pressures. A year later we were living together. A year later married. A year after that we were preparing for the birth of our first child.

Yet if I’m honest (and male), the downer back in that bleak January centred on my career. That winter I had to cope with the “failure” of my first book. Also, the enterprise I’d left banking in order to set up was going nowhere. Post dotcom crash, our internet “incubator” had declined to the point of being no more than a fight to save face (and savings). Our dreams looked naïve, as did my writing ambitions. So when I lit that next Marlboro Light, my thoughts would turn to what I’d thrown away. Banking in London, Moscow and New York – cutting deals with Russian oligarchs and financial whizzkids. For what?

But, again, it was the darkest hour. I’d often thought of starting a PR agency for banks but I’d never “got around” to it. My part of banking – corporate banking – was crying out for intelligent public relations from someone that fully understood the sector. But I’d always been too fearful. Stuck in the avoidance activity of “keeping a job” I’d done nothing about it. I was too concerned about the potential humiliation.

Well here I was – down and humbled. There was no fear of failure anymore because failed was the current state. There was only one way up.

Lamb’s words came back: “Did anyone tell you that the road would be straight and long?” No they didn’t. And it wasn’t. But once I realised it was a road I travelled, with a destination I wanted to get to, I worked out how to deal with the bends and occasional obstacle.

Of course, the retrospective sweetens the memory, and probably laces it with a little licence. I doubt I rose from the chair and started Moorgate Communications the next day. But, encouraged by my new girlfriend, it certainly happened that year. So thank you Lamb for such an atmospheric song. I couldn’t have got so low (and therefore so high) without you.

The good, the bad and those ugly neural hijackings

There’s one opinion I assert in What’s Stopping You? that may raise a few disbelieving eyebrows. It’s the notion that – in my opinion – everybody thinks of themselves as good people. And their bad behaviour, which many will admit, can be personally justified as forced upon them by poor opportunity or prejudice, or the righting of a perceived wrong. They were made to act in such a way, they’ll state, through circumstances not of their own making.

Certainly, this is how I’ve justified my own episodes of bad behaviour. There have been occasions when my reactions have been outrageous and damaging – ill-tempered, insulting, selfish and emotionally immature. And while I apologise now to anyone who suffered my nonsense, I maintain that – underneath – I was responding to what I perceived as an attack on me. That I was acting in my own defence. I was the victim (at least in my head), not the person on the receiving end of my temper or insults.

Yet this is a position I’m going to have to defend – not my own justifications (I know what goes on my head, at least most of the time), but those of people society condemns as “bad “ or “evil”. While the self-justification of a terrorist, even of Osama Bin Laden’s notoriety, is obvious (he felt his cause was just and required such extremism), can such a defence be made of bank robbers, murderers and or even rapists? These are surely selfish crimes, driven by uncontrolled greed or lust. Difficult as it is to assume from such a moral distance, I’m convinced it can – not from a moralistic point of view but from the wholly practical standpoint that, deep down, we all aim to be good people.

I’m not stating we are not responsible for the crimes we commit – we are 100 percent responsible. I’m just offering the view that those guilty of crime, in all its forms, will most-likely defend themselves on the grounds that they were forced to do it due to actions or circumstances that were not of their choosing. And that, given the choice – and differing circumstances – they’d have chosen peace, friendship, respect and a whole host of other positive reactions.

What’s this got to do with fear of failure? A lot. One of the most difficult aspects of any recovery programme for fear of failure is focused on our dealings with other people. It is our encounters with others that produce the fear-based and usually ill-conceived responses that send High-FFs (as I call those with fear of failure) in the wrong direction. Convinced we are under attack, we react defensively – aggressively even. This is the result of what Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence calls a neural hijacking: an emotional explosion in which the limbic system of the brain proclaims an emergency, “recruiting the rest of the brain to its urgent agenda”, says Goleman. This hijacking, which is instantaneous and arrives in an emotional surge, overrides what Goleman calls the “thinking brain” – leading to instant emotional responses based on fear, whatever the reality.

Is there any way we can prevent these neural hijackings? Again, as I state in What’s Stopping You? the unfortunate answer is no. I reason that fear of failure is an innate condition that is, in fact, a mild form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Traumatic events in our early childhood – some of which we may not even be aware of – have led us to respond with fear when triggered, leading to those neural hijackings that, in turn, lead to those terrible responses that, on reflection, we wish we could undo.

Is there an answer? Yes. While we cannot stop the neural hijackings, the poor responses they currently induce are not inevitable. Many of us, on reflection and after the passage of enough time for the emotional fog to clear, look back on those emotional fear-based moments and realise we may have misread or over-read the signals. We may have been under attack, but – probably – we misheard them or mistook the body-language or misunderstood the intention behind their comment or action. This realisation – hopefully (though certainly not always) – dawns on us after a while and we become embarrassed by our defensive response. A response moreover, that makes us appear the aggressor – adding to our sense of injustice and potentially sending us further down the path towards vengeful thoughts and actions.

The challenge, therefore, is to be able to have that second – better, more reflective – response sooner. In fact, if only we could have that second response as an instant reaction to the original neural hijacking, we’d have prevented the neural hijacking from generating the first defensive response (the one that’s turned us into the guilty party and left us isolated, alienated and embittered).

Developing a kinder response is, therefore, one of the most vital aspects of any recovery programme for a High-FF. We must think of everyone the way we want others to think of us: as essentially good people trying to overcome their own agonies and deal with their own insecurities. We don’t need to become evangelical about this. After all, few people like having their insecurities pointed out – something almost guaranteed to produce a neural hijacking in anyone on the receiving end. We just need to be aware that – at heart – everybody thinks of themselves as a good person and that any act or utterance that contradicts this conviction is almost certainly the reaction to some perceived slight or injustice. Or, more likely, we have misconstrued their actions.

And if we adjust our thinking to see it from their point of view, we’ve immediately transformed our view of them. Look hard enough and everyone has a justifiable viewpoint that, if we can empathise with, will deflect their perceived attack on - or threat to - us. And this, after a lot of practice, can help prevent those inevitable neural hijackings from producing those, far from inevitable, awful responses.

Edward Stobart: gentleman trucker, High-FF

Edward Stobart died on March 31st, aged just 56. Britain’s become used to lauding the attributes of its famous entrepreneurs – from James Dyson to Richard Branson to Peter Jones. Yet Stobart – despite his ubiquitous trucks on the UK’s motorway network – died as something of an unknown. Even the lorries carry his father’s name – Eddie – although it was Edward that turned it into the country’s most famous trucking brand.

From the excellent obituary of him in a recent Economist, I think I’ve worked out why. Unlike his contemporary entrepreneurs – who effuse the confidence and chutzpah and sheer certainty that the image of the entrepreneur (incorrectly) insists is a requirement for success – Edward Stobart, in my view, appeared to suffer from fear of failure.

I’m only going on the obituary – so this could well be wide of the mark – but here’s my evidence that Edward Stobart was, indeed, a High-FF (as I call those with a high fear of failure in What’s Stopping You?):

• He had a stammer, brought about by a traumatic childhood event – in his case a fall through a roof. As I write in What’s Stopping You? and recently on this blog, traumatic childhood events can induce a mild form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that generates a fearful response from tangentially-similar incidents in adulthood. And while a fall through a roof is not the usual public humiliation for triggering fear of failure, the resultant stammer is a classic fear-triggered response.

• No matter how large the business became, the persona of Eddie Stobart Ltd was through the trucks rather than himself. Mostly, he was the man eating egg and chips in the lorry-park café, with his fellow diners oblivious to the fact he was by far the most famous name in UK haulage (non-UK readers may be amazed to learn that “spot the Eddie Stobart truck” is now a more popular children’s travel game than eye-spy, or that there are more than 25,000 registered “spotters”, with many times that number unregistered).

• Stobart was always polite and always smart but he shied away from meeting strangers – a trait which prevented a public flotation of the company until after he sold his majority stake to his brother. My guess (and it is only a guess) was that he distrusted financial advisers and shareholders – perhaps fearing that their intrusion would reveal his personally-perceived (but deeply-held) self-belief in his own inadequacies.

• Trust was certainly an issue. As a child he showed entrepreneurial flair but kept all his savings in his trouser pocket. And he forced upon his drivers a rigid dress and conduct code (including wearing ties – something unheard of in the oil-n-nicotine stained trucking community). In fact his lack of trust in his workforce went as far as washing many of the trucks himself.

• Of course, both the tie wearing and manual truck-washing may suggest – not distrust – but a strong desire to project an upright professional image in a world renowned for sloppiness and poor manners. Such a desire to over-compensate can of course, be based on perceived insecurities regarding how the world might judge him or his brand.

• Indeed, he confessed that a lot of the brand’s power was down to image. He “didn’t hesitate to lie about how many lorries he had,” stated The Economist obituary. Again, this could show chutzpah but could equally reveal deeply-held feelings of inadequacy – as The Economist writes: “With his stammer, it was much easier to say, ‘no problem’ than to start picking difficulties.”

• Stobart’s first job, at 14, was on a JCB – planting roadsigns on the new M6 motorway. Apparently, he preferred spotting these to his own lorries. And he claimed they were both 10-feet high and 10-feet deep, which both The Economist thought and I think an apt analogy for the quiet man of trucking.

When it comes to enterprise, take it slow and steady

The following article has appeared in the latest edition (Spring) of the
RSA Journal, the house magazine of the RSA.

Slow and Steady . . .

Robert Kelsey argues that, far from being restricted to the privileged few, entrepreneurial opportunities abound in all walks of life

The coalition government believes that private-sector employment can replace the jobs being lost in the public sector, with start-up businesses being hailed as crucial contributors in this respect. At a time of continued economic uncertainty, however, can we really expect people from all social groups to embrace enterprise? Indeed, couldn’t it be considered socially irresponsible to encourage economically vulnerable people to bet their meagre life savings on a venture?

Yet for those facing social exclusion, entrepreneurship is potentially a liberating career choice. Surveys of UK entrepreneurs, such as recent research by data analysts Experian, show that ethnic minorities (including the Irish) and those with learning difficulties such as dyslexia are over-represented. This suggests that entrepreneurship is a naturally effective equal-opportunities arena, perhaps even counterbalancing ingrained prejudice in more formal working environments.

“The wish to overcome prejudice is a key reason why many people start out on their own,” says RSA Fellowship Council member Emma Jones, head of small-business support initiative Enterprise Nation. “Running your own business is fantastically meritocratic. It is also flexible in ways that employment simply cannot be, hence the large number of young mums starting businesses.”

Exclusion concerns do, of course, exist among budding entrepreneurs but they go beyond ethnic, gender, age and ability divides. This is creating a new kind of social gap: between people with high fear of failure (whom I call ‘High-FFs’) and their opposites, those with high achievement motivation (‘High-AMs’).

Fear of failure is a condition from which millions suffer, irrespective of gender, class, ethnicity or age. High-FFs approach tasks expecting failure and dreading the potential for public humiliation that such failure brings. This leads them to employ avoidance techniques that, ultimately, confirm their negative predictions. While many would love to start a business – often because they feel overlooked or belittled in their current situation – they are afraid of the risks involved, making fear of failure both a debilitating and self-fulfilling affliction.

TV programmes such as BBC’s Dragons’ Den don’t help. This is behind-the-sofa viewing for most High-FF would-be entrepreneurs, whose resolve to start a business is likely to be eroded with every public roasting from a ‘Dragon’. The steely traits that form the public image of the Dragons are a long way from those of the typical High-FF.

Like the Dragons, successful entrepreneurs create their own mythology. For instance, in his book The Beermat Entrepreneur, start-up guru Mike Southon writes: “Entrepreneurs are confident. They are born optimists: they simply know they can do it. Entrepreneurs are also charismatic. They inspire people…they have optimism to spare. Entrepreneurs are also arrogant. They know they are good.”

Yet entrepreneurialism has nothing to do with hardwired personality traits. Like so many other celebrity entrepreneurs, Southon is describing himself, while conveying an image of entrepreneurship that is overly aggressive, short-sighted and unfair, not least because it alienates – and therefore excludes – so many potential entrepreneurs.

A recent survey, presented at the UK launch of Global Entrepreneurship Week, revealed that about 50% of the UK population are considering becoming their own boss, yet only 5% are doing something about it. So what’s stopping the other 45%? Partly fear of the risks and costs associated with starting a new business, and partly fear that they do not fit the stereotype of the ‘maverick’ entrepreneur.

Emma Jones points out that most budding entrepreneurs are simply looking for freedom and flexibility in their working life. The typical small-business owner, she says, is a “mum who starts a business to earn extra money for the household while still being able to do the school run”. She adds: “This is a long way from the defy-all-odds swashbuckling heroes who are most associated with entrepreneurship.”

So what can be done? Support mechanisms such as Enterprise Nation are a start, but what about funding? Fear of the financial consequences of failure is a key barrier, making the reintroduction of the Thatcher-era Enterprise Allowance Scheme for the unemployed a strong move.

Yet many people overestimate the financial requirements for a start-up enterprise. Jones says that the best way to start a business is modestly: through cautious planning and by sticking to a strict budget, perhaps while working from home or, at least at first, continuing with the day job.

This is a crucial message. In some ways, too much funding can actually disadvantage entrepreneurs in the early stages of their venture. Grants, for instance, can create unnecessary and potentially fear-inducing liabilities, such as forcing a start-up to operate at a higher level than its income comfortably allows, thereby saddling it with unaffordable costs once the grant has been spent.

An effective alternative is self-financing, and especially ‘bootstrapping’, which involves entrepreneurs – especially nervous ones – starting small and staying within their means. Fred DeLuca, founder of sandwich chain Subway, began with an investment of US$1,000 (£750) and bootstrapped his way to a fortune. He relied on cash flow to expand and never over-extended himself through debt or equity, both of which bring external obligations that can increase both the risk and the fear.

“Just because it is small doesn’t mean the business can’t grow,” writes DeLuca in his book Start Small, Finish Big. “And, while it is small, you will have the time to learn the lessons that are essential to your future success.”

Such sentiments certainly undermine any notions of inequality when it comes to succeeding as an entrepreneur: quite the opposite. Indeed, fearful people of modest means are just as well suited to entrepreneurship as their bolder, more affluent counterparts. They may even be more so, given the need for start-ups to be grounded and sustainable, rather than overnight sensations.

Entrepreneurship can be isolating, however, which can compound fears, erode resolve and increase the failure rate. At Metrocube (an early noughties incubator for dotcom start-ups where I was CEO), our aim was to get would-be entrepreneurs out of their bedrooms and into a community environment where they could swap ideas and favours with a network of like-minded individuals. Fostering camaraderie is also one of the goals at the heart of Enterprise Nation and other collegiate initiatives such as the Institute of Entrepreneurs, run by RSA chairman Luke Johnson.

Networks offer more than just advice and resources. While these are helpful, it is the shared concerns and sense of fellowship that are vital to the lonely entrepreneur, especially if his or her own socio-economic grouping is under-represented in entrepreneurial circles. Mentoring can also be valuable, although care is needed when trying to impose formal structures on individuals who may just be looking for shared experiences, occasional guidance and – most importantly – a network.

Networks, however, are only part of the answer. More importantly, the image of entrepreneurship needs to change so that it encourages both the cautious and the fearful, proving that this most meritocratic of economic sectors is open to all.

Robert Kelsey FRSA is a businessman and author
Robert Kelsey’s book, What’s Stopping You? Why Smart People Don’t Always Reach Their Potential, and How You Can will be published by Capstone/Wiley in April 2011

[pull quote] Entrepreneurialism has nothing to do with hardwired personality traits
[call to action] The RSA’s Social Entrepreneurs Network provides a source of support and advice to Fellows interested in social enterprise. Join in the discussion at www.RSAfellowship.com/group/socialentrepreneursnetwork

Hating judo – and other fear of failure giveaways

My six year old son achieved something last week that eluded me as a child. He was awarded a red-belt at judo. This meant a presentation in front of the class and a round of applause. He was delighted.

So how come he could manage this rather modest achievement, while I couldn’t? Because I had fear of failure. My mother enrolled me on a judo class because she thought I needed toughening up. It always seemed a bit scary to me – a bit rough – but I played along hoping it may awaken a hitherto untapped talent for mindless violence. In fact I was hoping to develop the sort of attack mentality I was suffering from on the walk to school – though from much older boys – hence this rather 1970s response (I suspect dad had a hand in it somewhere).

Yet this felt like just another dose of the same – except in a sports hall (so officially sanctioned) and with people in white dressing gowns. And the teacher had bad breath and a dismissive “useless boy” way about him. Meanwhile, my son thinks fighting great fun and loves the idea of rolling around on mats and trying to wrestle each other to the ground. The whole thing suits his constant battle fantasies and gives his little brother some respite. And his teacher is a female national champion likely to be in the Great Britain Olympic team. She’s not to be messed with but still oozes warmth and love for her charges, unlike my episode which seemed to bear more of a resemblance to Lord of the Flies.

So there are key differences in teaching and atmosphere that led my six-year old the right way and me down another activity cul-de-sac (football and the Cubs were two others I joined and, immediately sought to avoid). But the key difference was that he approached judo assuming he’d be good at it and saw the setbacks as just temporary: a technique to be learnt (usually a violent one). While I approached judo fearfully – expecting to fail. Pretty soon I was complaining to my mother that I was too tired, or more interested in football, or that Blue Peter had an item our teacher wanted us to watch.

Looking back, my fear of failure was pretty evident. So what are the classic signs that we are High-FFs (as I call those with a high fear of failure in What’s Stopping You?) – both as a child and an adult? Here are a few – some from personal experience, some from the wide body of psychological research on the subject (and all with the caveat that any one of these traits is not evidence in itself of fear of failure – there could be other explanations).

1) Difficulty settling into mainstream activities. As above, this was certainly a major one for me. I just couldn’t settle in any club or formalised non-curricular activity. Partly this was due to an innate rebelliousness (see below) but a core problem was that I secretly feared failure and, therefore, sought to avoid the activity. Occasionally I’d be tempting in – seeing other boys enjoying football or church-hall dramatics or chess – but it would never last. Even as an adult, hobbies are fleeting and soon forgotten – usually after the first humiliation.

2) Rebelliousness. This can include music-based cultures – perhaps punks or (more recently) emos where the “shock” is mainly delivered through inappropriate dress. Yet it could develop into something more serious – perhaps indulging in misdemeanours relevant to the social backdrop of the sufferer. This includes becoming disruptive in class, being a petty vandal, a shop-lifter, car-jack, or even just a smoker. Bullying or, if less confident, becoming one of the bully’s lieutenants is – surprisingly – another trait of the classic High-FF (anything that rejects mainstream behaviour).

3) Exam stress. This is an obvious one but even mild fear of failure can cause extreme exam stress, with High-FFs potentially taking their avoidance tactics (conscious or otherwise) to extremes. Feigning illness (or even experiencing the illness), panic attacks and even deliberately sabotaging the exam are all avoidance tactics (perhaps feigning an “I don’t care” attitude).

4) “Dream fulfilment” careers. Some of the most outwardly-ambitious people may, in reality, be indulging in High-FF avoidance of sensible but challenging career choices. These can include those focused on “wildest dream” career choices such as pop stardom or TV fame. Crucially, the near-impossibility of achieving the dream means they will be kindly judged for being “a trier”, and it may mask their avoidance of realistic but challenging career choices (usually involving qualifications). Watch the early episodes of the X-Factor or any other reality TV show for examples.

5) Acting the clown. This one can follow us all the way through our lives. High-FFs are often the school, office or shopfloor clown – the joker that everyone likes, despite (and partly because of) their lowly status. On the surface at least, being the popular cheeky-chappie appears to be more important to the office clown that making progress. However, it's usually a mask hiding an inner sense of inadequacy.

6) Avoiding promotion. High-FFs can actively seek to avoid promotion, even when they are the obvious candidate. Excuses may vary (including claiming a “fear of success”) but it is usually based on an inner conviction that failure and – importantly – humiliation will result. Many declare themselves happier among the troops than the officers or show no desire to “fall out with Fred/John/Joan” who may be contesting the promotion.

7) Criticising and feuding. The High-FFs view of his or her workplace (or school, studio, college) is most likely to be a negative one. Indeed, High-FFs are usually highly critical of the way all external life is executed – sometimes publicly and vocally so. They can be part of the moaning canteen gang – perhaps its leader. And they can direct their criticisms at particular individuals – usually those they fear. Inevitably this leads to petty rivalries that can even develop into full-blown and disruptive feuds. Oddly, the other end of the scale – over-enthusiasm – can also be a mask to hide self-perceived inadequacies.

8) Injustice convictions. This was definitely one of my major giveaways – assuming slights or insults were meant and personal, looking (and usually finding) prejudice or favouritism to others (real or otherwise), developing acute paranoia about the intentions of colleagues and managers. Of course, these can turn into self-fulfilling prophesies if we are not careful, and can also lead to a disastrous vengeful attitude. In its extreme, this can lead to pilfering and absenteeism and other misbehaviour based on a “why shouldn’t I?” mentality.

9) Poor luck. High-FFs are convinced they have poor luck. That they are always in the wrong place at the wrong time, especially at those crucial moments. Job interviews are blighted by late trains or random illnesses (food poisoning from a banana was one of mine). New jobs or promotions have unexpected crises or challenges visited upon them only after we arrive – all seemingly beyond our control. Of course, in reality we are searching the horizon for icebergs, and immediately manning the lifeboats, rather than giving them the wide berth the previous captain quietly managed.

10) Choking. This is perhaps an obvious one but one no less harmful for that. Job interviews, presentations, key meetings – those important moments that require a strong performance are the very moments we lose our self-confidence and “choke”. We may even develop physical traits such as the shakes, or sweats, or a wobbly voice. More usually we say stupid things, forget obvious answers and come across as a fool: the usual self-fulfilling results of High-FF behaviour, in other words.

My webpage.

Even for Kings, the monkey comes too

Another long flight and another chance to catch up on the latest(ish) movies: this time The King’s Speech. I was amazed: the parallels between King George VI’s (Bertie’s) speech impediment and fear of failure – the psychological condition I write about in What’s Stopping You? (out this month, by the way) – are remarkable, as were some of the routes to recovery.

The film hinges on the king’s introduction to Lionel Logue, a maverick Australian speech therapist who flew in the face of conventional thinking when it came to the treatment of impediments. Prior to seeing him, the poor prince (then the Duke of York) had to endure a succession of physicists treating it as a purely physiological problem. They had him chewing marbles and even smoking. Yet it was only Logue who saw the condition as psychological and the actual impediment as its physical impact: a symptom of the underlying mental condition. This was evidenced by the fact the stammer was exacerbated by fear – for instance when talking to his father (George V) or when being confronted by his brother (Edward VIII).

And it’s here where the similarities with fear of failure become compelling.

So while the physiological exercises were ongoing, Logue probed the prince’s mental condition – breaking through after a few whiskies. Once Bertie was willing to divulge his childhood traumas – mainly his nanny’s rejection and humiliation of him – Logue was able to identify this trauma as the root of the future king’s stammer, when previously the assumption was that it was something “he had always had”.

Logue’s experience as a speech therapist was in treating returning Anzacs from the western front during the First World War. Many had such serious shell-shock their speech was majorly affected. These days, we call shell-shock Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and, as I write in What’s Stopping You? it is the key prerequisite for fear of failure – especially cases involving early episodes of public humiliation or rejection.

Of course, the fear of failure version is mild compared to shell-shocked soldiers but the responses are apparent nonetheless – and they include stammering as much as they include fear of failure. High-FFs (as I call those with a high fear of failure) fear rejection and the humiliation of failure, which leads them to pursue avoidance tactics with respect to tasks, careers and even personal life choices: anything that brings the potential for humiliation.

Yet I was further fascinated by Logue’s treatment of Bertie. As the abdication crisis gathered force it became apparent our stammerer was going to end up king and be forced to embrace his biggest fear: of public speaking, including via the new technology of live radio broadcasts. It was obvious to Logue, however, that fear triggered Bertie’s doubts about his abilities to speak fluently, which then became self-fulfilling.

This is identical to those with fear of failure. I call this the monkey on our shoulder, who whispers doubt into our ear at the very moments we need to be brave. Logue could rouse Bertie into angry – but perfectly fluent – outbursts. Swearing and singing were also not a problem. But it was those moments of tension – the very moments he needed fluent speech – that his fluency would elude him. And those moments in front of a live microphone were sheer terror.

This certainly struck a chord. I can remember the first time I was on national radio – on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House. As the presenter turned to me the monkey grabbed my ear and said: “this is it. This is IT. The whole country’s listening and you haven’t a clue what to say: have you? They should never have invited you on. You’re a fraud”.

Incapable of clear thinking, my voice cracked, which caused me to panic and retreat to hackneyed clichés. The presenter looked for a chance to escape my failing performance and rarely came back to me after that. Thanks to the monkey, I’d screwed my moment and was never invited back. My 15 minutes of fame lasted about a minute and a half.

Yet Bertie has to face the whole country – literally – at his coronation (the first to be broadcast live to the empire). So how does Logue keep the monkey quiet? By making light of the whole thing. As they rehearse he talks of the archbishop “poncing up the stairs”, of him talking “rubbish, rubbish, rubbish” – all to try and strip the archbishop of his authority (and Bertie his fear of it).

Another fear-reduction tactic used for direct broadcasts (rather than ceremonies) was for Logue to stand right in front of the king so that the broadcasts felt like no more than just another session with the therapist. Winston Churchill also offered his own wisdom – saying that he made a virtue of his own speech impediment, making his part of a distinct style (in what became probably the most famous speech-making style in history). This helped the king recover from the odd halt – stating that he had to “throw in a few so they knew it was me”. Thus the monkey’s power was neutered.

In What’s Stopping You? I discuss the potential for making a virtue of our fears and insecurities – for instance helping us realize that our sensitivities usually mean we are creative and strong lateral thinkers – traits we should harness as we seek to make progress. And that our sensitivity brings with it problems on our way up that can turn us into effective leaders once we become managers, because we understand the sensitivities of the people we lead. Certainly, I’m keen to ensure we realize that our fears are part of us. That the monkey comes too and that accepting him as a fellow passenger is an important part of our recovery.

Finally, in Logue I saw something of myself (if I’m permitted the vanity). He possessed no qualifications and was simply offering his experiences as he saw them, which allowed him to come at the issue from a different direction, and one that offended establishment figures. I too have no formal qualifications to discuss fear of failure. In fact my main qualification is as a sufferer, and as someone who’d read 100s of books on “failure”, “success”, “confidence” and “self-esteem” and found a major gap between what most psychologists stated was innate and the self-help gurus said was possible (if you follow their advice). I saw a role in researching both deeply and in trying, through writing, to both marry the two and convey this for any reader potentially stymied by their fear of failure, and other insecurities halting their progress.

I wasn’t expecting to like The King’ Speech. I expected a typical Merchant Ivory style offering of the romanticized English upper classes. But – thanks to my research into fear of failure and other fear-based insecurities – I loved it.

Feel the fear – and fully understand it before doing anything

“What’s that other book – err – oh yes, Feel the fear and do it anyway. That’s the one. Is your book the same as that one?”

I keep hearing it, so I’d better address it head on. What’s so different about What’s Stopping You? (due out next month, by the way) and Susan Jeffers’s well-known and best-selling book dealing with the fears that can prevent us from taking action?

On the surface, of course, they are similar. Both are focused on those that may have fear of failure, or other fear-based insecurities that are preventing them for achieving their potential. Both set out a course of action in order to help navigate those fears. Yet that’s where the similarity ends. In both style and content they are very different, as they are in both message and structure, and in the description of our condition and – perhaps most importantly – the journey required to prevent it disabling our progress.

A crucial aspect is the style. Jeffers invokes many case studies that feel fictional (although she states they are from her “fear classes”). They are of people such as Mary Alice, Patti, Teddy and Janet. Some want a better job. Some more respect from their partners. Others are keen to become artists or to overcome their fear of aging. These are feel-good tales of suburban redemption in which Janet goes back to college and Kevin summons up the courage to ask that girl for a date – all after a pep-talk from Susan.

Many people will be engaged by such a saccharin style, although it leaves me unmoved. I’m now in my 40s and have had plenty of encouraging chats from well-meaning people full of home-spun wisdom. Sure, the book gets more technical later (though not that much more technical), but another pep-talk from mum isn’t what’s needed in my opinion. I’d rather know why my brain reacts as it does when faced with major (and even minor) challenges. What process creates such reactions, and why are they so disabling? So I’m more of the persuasion that the sound reasoning of a psychologist (or even neurologist) is what’s required – telling me about post-traumatic stress disorder and its link, via traumatic childhood events and “fear conditioning”, to fear of failure.

I’d rather write about the permanent damage this can cause to the brain’s amygdale (a key cluster of components in the limbic system dealing with emotions such as anxiety, distress and fear). And the fact incidents of public humiliation as a young child can create an imprint generating a lifelong resetting of the brain’s default (i.e. instant) responses to potentially-humiliating situations. The fact it is this faulty wiring that leads sufferers to respond with fear is, in my view, crucial – especially as, in many cases, they don’t even realise why they are so fearful. Only from such awareness can sufferers, in my opinion, develop an appropriate strategy for progress. Yet none of this is explained in Susan Jeffers’s book.

I’m not saying there’s no room for the Jeffers approach. What I’m saying is that there’s also room for the more analytical approach. For instance, Feel the fear. . ..chapter one ends with giant and bold capitals shouting I’LL HANDLE IT! In fact, the entire chapter and much of the book is peppered with these capitalised “ra-ra” messages and this “go girl (or boy), you can do it” tone runs right through the book. This places Feel the fear…within the classic self-help genre that I’m somewhat critical of in What’s Stopping You? because, ultimately, they are asking you to become somebody you are not. In my opinion, such rousing prose soon fades. Without fully understanding our insecurities and fears they will soon resurface – usually at the first major setback.

This style of self-help book angers some psychologists because it deals with only the symptoms of the condition. They see it as an injection of foreign ideas and methodology into vulnerable people without offering any understanding of why their fears and insecurities have developed or retained such a grip on their behaviour. The assumption is that all fearful people can adopt somebody else’s personality traits. Traits that potentially go against the grain of their default and hardwired personalities. Yet “reframing” the brain of insecure people with helpful phrases that have to be repeated in front of the bathroom mirror (a Jeffers favourite) is a form of self-denial in my opinion (and the opinion of many psychologists). It is the adoption of a mask that, after the inevitable slip, can lead to a damaging reckoning.

I’ll give one (of many) examples:
“For the women reading this book,” says Jeffers, “a good antidote to any inner conflict between power and femininity is to repeat to yourself a least twenty-five times each morning, noon and night:

I AM POWERFUL AND I AM LOVED and I AM POWERFUL AND I AM LOVING.”

This has to be done aloud to allow the “pain-to-power concept” to really take hold. In fact, there is a helpful chart plotting this concept that has the word PAIN at one end, then an arrow pointing towards the word POWER. This is called the Pain-to-Power Chart and we are invited to draw it and place it on a convenient wall.

Ignoring the over-simplification of a complex mental condition for a moment, my own view of this chart if that, during my worst years with fear of failure, it would not have survived the first setback. In fact, as I was reading this I could visualise the moment it would have been ripped off the wall in anger as the pain of yet another rejection or dead-end or fear-induced self-fulfilling emotional reaction hit home. We are almost in the same territory as the hypnotisers and acupuncturists here – the world that promises “instance and transformative change” without any analysis or reflection or hard-fought re-evaluation.

Apologies. This is starting to sound like a trashing of Jeffers’s book. It isn’t meant to be. Any book that has sold so well will have helped many people take that all-important next step. And that’s a powerful thing that I’m in no position to criticise. I guess I’m simply stating that my target is the slightly more intelligent reader – someone looking deeply, as I did, at the root causes of their hardwired but disabling personality traits. Someone that wants to fully understand what is stopping them, before accepting it as part of them – a mental limb that is coming too, no matter what we say and do to remove it. But somebody determined to make progress despite the mental obstacles – through navigating the barriers thrown in our path (both externally and internally).

Which brings me to the title of Jeffers’s book – and my deepest criticism (sorry!). Having quoted over 100 books in What’s Stopping You? the only line I found worth quoting in Feel the fear and do it anyway was the title. And that was to refute its premise – at least the “do it anyway” proposition. Of course, we attack the same condition – fear of failure – but we differ fundamentally on the prescription because we have taken a different route from the diagnosis. Jeffers starts with the fear and works her way forwards, injecting helpful thoughts and tips as we pursue the goals that are triggering those fearful moments. What’s Stopping You? also starts with the fear. But it then works its way backwards, to how we got ourselves in this position. And this has a profound impact on how we should move forward from our current, stuck, status – re-evaluating our goals and seriously questioning the “do it anyway” element of Jeffers’s premise.

To explain, many fear of failure sufferers harbour inner dreams that occupy the highest-shelves of achievement. Many want to become famous via music, sport or broadcasting. Few will, because the dream is a nonsense conjured from our fear-based avoidance of challenging but realistic career choices that may involve exams and qualifications or other dreaded evaluations. In reality most fear of failure sufferers have yet to explore their real goals because their goals have all been motivated by the fear of public humiliation which, extraordinarily, can manifest itself in a willingness to pursue impossible dreams while eschewing challenging but obtainable career paths. And many sufferers may not even realise that this is where they stand – nurturing avoidance-based but inappropriate “wildest dreams” that are not goals at all. They are fantasies.

Yet Jeffers – and many other self-help writers – are focused on offering those with fear of failure the chance to, indeed, be a popstar. They are not decrying the dream as inappropriate or driven by avoidance of realistic but difficult challenges, as I am. Instead, they are saying: “go on – you can be a popstar” – despite the fact the desire to be a popstar may be yet another symptom or their fear of failure. Given this, my book is a million miles from “that other book” on the same subject.

That said, I want to end on a positive note. One thing Jeffers emphasises throughout is the need to take responsibility. And this means never “blaming anyone else for anything you are being, doing, having or feeling”. Yet it is also not blaming yourself – because that too is avoiding responsibility. “There I am messing up my life again. I’m hopeless,” is – again – not taking responsibility (other writers such as Stephen Covey support this). In fact, Jeffers is so strong on this vital requirement for recovery that she dedicates a whole chapter on it. It’s called “Whether You Want It or Not…It’s Yours” and it’s her best – even with the cuddly tales of Jean, Kevin and Tanya.

The revenge of the nerd

A long flight and I finally get to see The Social Network, the recently released movie on the founding of Facebook. As an entrepreneur I find the execution of ideas into reality fascinating, hence my addiction to programmes such as Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice despite their being run through the inevitable anti-business mangle of the BBC (making anyone interested in business appear dodgy, unlikeable and/or criminal). No less so Hollywood, it seems, as The Social Network quickly descends into a near-farce of backstabbing perfidiousness and intrigue, whatever the historical reality.

Like most people, I watch movies developing either sympathy or antipathy towards the main characters, although I’m often attracted or repelled in the inverse to the director’s most obvious intentions. Yet this was a difficult one to call, as the scriptwriter’s (Aaron Sorkin’s) obvious intention of pointing out accredited founder Mark Zuckerberg’s character flaws was balanced by the lack of other characters deserving support.

The narrative focuses on Zuckerberg’s defence against two law suits aimed at recognizing the significant role played by others in the creation of Facebook. Zuckerberg is portrayed as an disagreeable misanthropist whose lack of empathy for his fellow students borders on Asperger’s Syndrome (although an online debate on the subject concludes against this notion). His misanthropy – it seems – extended to shafting a group of New England aristos (Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra) who claimed the idea as their own and Zuckerberg as originally no more than their recruited programmer. It also extended to freezing out Paul Ceglia, the original funder of Zuckerberg’s venture, and apparently the only person on campus with a favourable view of our inventor prior to his success with Facebook.

My empathy was certainly not triggered by the plight of the aristos. As Zuckerberg said (at least in the movie), their ire was triggered by the fact this was the first time in their lives that something had not gone their way. Astonished by Zuckerberg’s chutzpah – a boy they seemed to consider an unattractive, unclubbable outsider – they used daddy’s attorney to plot retribution for the “stolen” idea.

Partly, my lack of empathy for the aristos comes from my former role as Metrocube CEO, where we witnessed many start-up companies in our London incubators and developed an insight into what entrepreneurial contributions counted, and what didn’t. One contribution that counted for very little was the idea. In fact, it counted for nothing – zilch – in our view because we saw that execution was everything. And if you lacked the skills to execute your idea – as the aristos appeared to – you were vulnerable to those that had such skills, as the aristos discovered. One of the reasons we believed this at Metrocube was because it was clear that, in any given set of circumstances, several if not many people were capable of having the same idea simultaneously.

In the case of Facebook (again going by the movie), it was various houses at Harvard College that had the original online “facebook” (yes, even apparently using that name) for undergraduates. So to make the leap into a cross campus Facebook, with added functionality for further personal details, was such a small leap of imagination that it hardly even deserves the credit of being an idea (not least because MySpace was well established at the time). From what I could see, it was simply a race to market and it was the aristos’ bad luck to “employ” (there was no sign of a contract) a programmer with entrepreneurial ambition.

Or was it such bad luck? I’m just going on the movie (and some fact-checking on Wiki) but the aristos won a substantial settlement ($65m according to the movie, $20m according to Wiki), which – in my view – they can put down to their fabulous luck in choosing Zuckerberg as their programmer. Anyone else and no enterprise would have gotten off the ground, giving them no one to sue for "their" brilliant idea (and I’d wager there are others who also claim the idea). Daddy’s attorney certainly earned his fee on that one (as stated, just an opinion based purely on the movie).

Yet my empathy did extend to Zuckerberg’s “only friend” (as he called himself during his lawsuit) and the original funder of the venture – roommate Paul Ceglia. While ideas are cheap (free even), risking cash at such an early stage deserves reward. And Facebook would have remained no more than an idea without Ceglia’s $1,000 – making his “three-F” stage investment (friends, family and fools) crucial.

So what of Zuckerburg himself? The misfit, the geek, the social outcast – this is a difficult character to empathise with, not least because he doesn’t seem to seek our empathy. In the movie, at least, he seeks revenge – against his girlfriend for dumping him, against all womankind (at least on campus) for finding him unattractive, against the college establishment, against the WASP jocks that guarded entry to the elite clubs and houses at Harvard.

In terms of social skills Zuckerburg appears to follow the Millwall FC mantra of “no one likes us, but we don’t care”. At least, he seems to accept his unpopularity as a price for his genius. Arrogance is the result, as well as an entrepreneurial clumsiness that most will see as typical of the billionaire mindset although, in most cases, leads to disaster and no eventual movie portrayal. Even for Zuckerburg, it resulted in lawsuits that – in the case of Ceglia at least – could and should have been avoided with a more synergistic approach.

One obvious question for this blog is whether Zuckerburg is a High-FF (someone with a high fear of failure, as described in What’s Stopping You?)? I think not. Certainly his social awkwardness is a High-FF trait, although the key aspect of High-FF behaviour he lacks is avoidance. He jumps right in – elbowing others out of the way in the process. Convinced of his messianic mission, he remains focused on the end result and is happy to make small adjustments on the way (such as dropping “the” from the title). This makes Zuckerburg more a classic High-AM (those with high achievement motivation – the opposite to a High-FF).

Nor Ceglia, who was happy to back Zuckerburg with cash on more than one occasion prior to the website earning a dime. No, the real High-FFs in the story (at least as portrayed by the movie) were the three aristos who claimed the original idea, outsourced it to a “doer” – thus ceding control to the High-AM – and then complained bitterly that their idea had been stolen. Only their rich daddy and his attorney saved them from achieving nothing from “their idea” – like millions of High-FFs before them who have also had ideas and then failed to act.

Not all High-FFs, it seems, are deserving of empathy.

Famous quotes for overcoming fear of failure

There’s one box on the Facebook profile that’s always bothers me: favourite quotations. I never know what to put. Listing loads looks like I’m trying too hard but narrowing it down to one may make me look too intense – as if it’s a mantra for my every move.

Yet I do like quotations. They summarize great truths in a memorable phrase, making them far more influential than entire books written on similar subjects. If life comes down to a few moments (to quote Bud Fox in the original Wall Street), then – indeed – our beliefs come down to a few quotes, usually pithily summarized by famous or historical figures.

So what are mine? Given that I count myself as a recovering High-FF (someone overcoming fear of failure), here are four that I find myself quoting more than others.

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” Eleanor Roosevelt (former U.S. first lady). I like this because it states that we are responsible for our feelings – especially with regards to our self beliefs. We must take responsibility for our inner reactions, even to insults.

We are all insulted from time-to-time but it normally says far more about the insulter than the insulted – unless we let it. Of course, this is easier said than done. Insults, or even unintentional slights, can cut us to the core because, so often, we feel they contain a grain of truth. If our self beliefs are negative we are bound to treat insults as confirmations, while ignoring or mistrusting flattery. Yet Roosevelt is simply pointing out that it is our reaction that matters here, not the insult itself (which may have even been unintentional).

“Don't regret not doing something, regret doing it,” Terry Venables (former England football coach). Terry was an Essex lad with West End tastes, and this may sometimes have led him astray. But it more often led him towards achieving his goals. The key is he took action. Sure he made mistakes but his regrets were based on his actions, not his inactions.

I can certainly empathise with this. My first book, published in 2000, contains some passages that make me cringe with embarrassment every time I’m reminded of them. Indeed, my mother, who read a proof, warned me that I’d end up regretting the book if I allowed it to be published. She was right, of course. But the other voice in my head – the one saying that what I’d really regret is turning aside the chance to fulfil my ambition of becoming a published author – was more right.

Life often comes down to decisions between action and inaction: change versus the status quo. All Venables is saying is that the worst form of regret is the “if only” retrospective. Mistakes made are far better than opportunities lost – at least if we want to make progress in our life.

In the end, even my cringe at some of the content of my previous book soon turns to a smile. What was I thinking? I say to myself, and then inwardly chuckle – having learnt the lesson that I need to be aware that what I write today will matter tomorrow. If I’d listened to my mother, however, my frustration at the lost opportunity would have been unbearable.

“KBO (keep buggering on),” Winston Churchill (former UK PM). This became his motto during what his biographers termed the wilderness years of the 1930s. From the backbenches of the House of Commons he tried to warn the world of the dangers of Nazism while the war-weary democracies ignored him, even seeing him as a warmonger (a charge that returned after the war). Yet he also used it during the bleak years of the 1940s with Britain being bombed nightly by a seemingly-invincible enemy.

In both cases it captures the mood perfectly. Emboldened by his inner beliefs and convictions, the phrase allowed Churchill to keep going despite numerous setbacks and humiliations. After each knock Churchill would pick himself up, dust himself down, learn the lesson, mutter "KBO" and move on – no less convinced of the inalienable truth of his cause.

In fact Churchill coined many memorable quotations during his extraordinary life (although modern revisionists lacking Churchill’s originality of thought like to claim he stole some of them). How about this one to enrich his KBO theme: “If you are going through hell, keep going”. As with KBO, it recognises the struggle. The pain is acknowledged, as is the difficulty. Nonetheless, the only allowable response is to, indeed, keep going.

“Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser,” Alan Hansen (former footballer and current TV football pundit). This is perhaps an unusual one to include because it smacks of the school “Jock” lording it over his weedier peers. The phrase is, indeed, laced with testosterone but that’s just one interpretation – and certainly the one I would have chosen in previous years. Now it tells me that I must have fight. That I cannot be a pacifist in my own endeavours.

Frustration is a key “action signal”, as "life-change" guru Anthony Robbins would say. If we feel like a loser – that life is unfair and has gone against us - that we are capable of more and better but that our luck or timing was out, then, in fact, those are good feelings because they can be converted into action. The worst response – at least for our progress – is to shrug and smile and console ourselves that the other guy was probably more deserving anyway. No he/she wasn’t. It was indeed unfair. We were cheated. The result was a travesty.

Convert that anger into energy, point that energy in the right direction, pull the trigger – and GET OUT OF MY WAY!!!

Allen Carr for the soul

When researching What’s Stopping You? I quickly became disenchanted with nearly all of the self-help books I’d read over the years. It wasn’t their recommendations that bothered me – in fact many contained some great tips and methodologies that have been included in my book (TBP February 2011 by John Wiley & Sons). It was more fundamental than that. I had a problem with their premise.

The main issue was what they promised, which was a cure for mental conditions such as fear of failure and low self esteeem. Researching my book meant talking to psychologists and researching both academic and popular psychology texts. And each time the same fundamental truth screamed out at me: our fears and insecurities – including fear of failure, low self-esteem, anxiety and poor confidence – are innate. Once and however inflicted we are hardwired to our inner beliefs. Sure we can treat the symptoms but our core beliefs are here for life. As I say in the book, that monkey on my back (you know the one – he whispers doubts and fears at the very moments we need confidence and resilience) isn’t going to just disappear after a few motivational passages from a self-help guru. So why are so many self-help books promising to “change your life – forever” when it is something they simply cannot deliver?

Of course, there’s a chance many of the authors realise this but know that offering progress (via their techniques) without the all-important promise of wholesale changes to our personality would compromise their marketability. They surmised, probably rightly, that people are looking for a cure for their insecurities – in fact they are looking for a cure that is pretty much instant. And while the books were incapable of delivering on their promises in full, they reasoned that any application of their techniques would deliver some progress, which would justify the over-promising.

Yet this just wasn’t good enough for me, or – I thought – the many intelligent people out there that are hampered by their insecurities. Sure, they want help, but smart people only have to pick up most of these books to see through the over-promising. They are turned off by the smiling face of “Mr Successful” beaming out from the front cover, before making statements such as “it worked for me, it’ll work for you”. Indeed, words like “mastering” “unlimited” “guaranteed” are everywhere. And everywhere they put off intelligent people that, nonetheless, want to navigate their insecurities.

So while I thought there was a market for a book that didn’t treat the reader like a child – that told the truth about our condition but then helped us use self-help methodologies to make strong progress anyway – I did worry whether such a book would have any resonance with a wider audience (than just me, that is). Just maybe those smart people were also too self-conscious – or maybe too British – to ever buy a book written with them in mind.

Luckily I had one, somewhat unusual, example as a potential template: Allen Carr’s the Easy Way to Stop Smoking (1985). Despite helping millions of people give up smoking – and despite the book’s name – Carr offers no miracle cure for the nicotine addict. The first half of the book simply describes the life of a smoker – exploding many myths and delusions about the impact of smoking (for instance, explaining that it causes rather than relieves stress) – and the nature of addiction (explaining that it is no more than a mild feeling of emptiness, that dissipates in a few days).

Crucially, Carr – a former 100-cigarettes a day addict – then tells us that the desire to smoke will not simply disappear. Even after a period of not smoking – even when we think we have finally conquered the addiction – we will occasionally be triggered by situations where we had previously “enjoyed” smoking. Carr states that these are the moments we must guard against and plan for. But, with his help, the smoker can navigate their way such triggerings via self-awareness and clear thinking.

Carr’s trick is to describe, not only the false paradigm that is the world of the smoker, but how we will behave once we quit. First, the “monster inside us” (in fact a similar creature to the monkey on my back) will kick and scream as it copes with nicotine withdrawals. But it will soon realise it has to get clever – suggesting a reward for “having done so well” or claiming that it was so easy “we could quit anytime” – or even going for the “just one puff” honeytrap. Then it will get angry and try anything to trap us: for instance inventing rows with loved ones so we can shout “look what you made me do” as we grab the fags. Yet through self-realisation that this is happening we are no longer fooled and can call the monster’s bluff.

Carr made the smoker mentally ready for the battle ahead – not through any self delusions (except perhaps in the title of his book) – but through self awareness. And that was my aim when writing What’s Stopping You? I’m not promising a cure. The clinical evidence suggests that we will have to accept the news that we are who we are. The fears that dog us now will always be with us. But that doesn’t mean we are helpless. Far from it. It just means that we must take account of our fears and insecurities as we make progress. We need to be aware of our faulty wiring – helping us benchmark judgements that take account of the fact we are likely to be making fear-based, rather than rational, evaluations.

In the writing of What’s Stopping You? therefore, I have to acknowledge my debt to Allen Carr. Oh, and he also helped me stop smoking in 1991 after 10-years as an "addict". By the way, Allen Carr died of lung cancer in 2006 and, despite probably saving thousands from a similar fate, has never been recognised by the UK government for his work. The reason: according to Carr, the government ignored his recommendations because they were a refutation of the nicotine replacement therapy the government (thanks to powerful lobbying) favoured. So much for self-awareness.

The greatest self-help philosopher of all? Karl Popper of course

A reposting of old posts (from the old blog) that I like.

Having just written a self-help book (What’s Stopping You? TBP 2011) about overcoming fear of failure, it may seem odd that one of the books I enthusiastically quote is an anti self-help diatribe. In The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need (2005) neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall attacks the self-help industry’s version of happiness and fulfilment and instead suggests greater “well-being” may come from developing a “contrarian consciousness” or what he calls a “yes but” mental attitude.

In other words Pearsall’s plea is for a high level of scepticism regarding the claims of the self-help industry or “self potential” movement as he calls it. There’s “not just one good life” he states, so we should stop looking for it – and instead search for “a good life”. Discontentment cannot be cured by consumption, he claims, even of ideas. Indeed, it is the “compliant thinking” encouraged by the self-help industry that seems to most annoy Pearsall. Sometimes vulnerable people evaluate this now huge industry at face value, he states – accepting the strong words flowing from the page or DVD because they sound right and feel comforting and appeal directly to our own personal pain. Yet in doing so we are ignoring the rigours of scientific reasoning – often we are ignoring our own intuition and experience.

Indeed, we have been hypnotised – but not in order to improve our lives. Instead, we have been seduced into unquestioningly believing and accepting the statements of the “guru” or “life-coach” saying them. How could we not? After all, to question the validity of the cure is to render it impotent. The balm only works if we believe – and even if that belief conjures no more than the benefits of a placebo effect, at least it still counts as a benefit, doesn’t it?

Yet Pearsall states we must be mindful of the claims of the self-help industry – nothing is proven and much of it is “grounded” not in science but in mysticism and spirituality. Of course, Pearsall’s attitude chimes well with my own, which is why I liked his book. In my view conditions such as fear of failure are incurable, although progress is possible once we realise this and restructure our responses accordingly. But he also struck a chord because he made me realise my own approach may have stronger theoretical roots than I had previously realised.

In fact, Pearsall’s book took me right back to my first-year undergraduate lectures in political theory. Wide-eyed with enthusiasm I would arrive at the Monday lecture to hear about the works and theories of Thomas Hobbes, or John Locke, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Max Weber or Karl Marx. After 90 minutes I was inevitably convinced and would spend the rest of the week becoming further indoctrinated by reading the actual works or other supporting books and articles. Yet on the following Monday we’d hear the critique of the theorist – the often blood-drenched riposte that would leave me cursing my naivety at ever being taken in by such an obvious charlatan with so easily-refutable ideas.

This cycle of conviction and disillusion – of total belief followed by total disbelief – lasted until the Monday of the lecture on Karl Popper. Popper’s quest was to decide from all the theories and ideas that had sometimes fiercely competed in the post-Enlightenment world what was science and what was not science. Far from trying to disprove a particular theory or philosophy, Popper was simply trying to find a way of cutting through the noise – of being able to evaluate the ideas being postulated and see which deserved to be labeled a “science” and which didn’t.

This transformed my view of politics. Popper had shared my confusion, but instead of bobbing about with the ebbs and flows and currents – as I had in those Monday morning lectures in 1980s Manchester – he had invented a structure by which non-quantifiable ideas could be immediately judged. His key notion was one of falsifiability or refutability – that anything purporting to be a scientific theory had to be able to submit itself to physical experiments that could show it to be false. This doesn’t mean that it is false, just that the theory offers observable predictions that are open to being proved or disproved.

For instance, if we theorized that once the workers had seized the modes of production for themselves the state would whither away, we are open to the charge of refutability if the state stubbornly refuses to die and in fact grows stronger. And while we can quibble regarding the reasons why our theory failed to pan out as predicted, it has nonetheless been falsified and therefore can no longer call itself a scientific theory. Of course, those that cling to this view could add the word “eventually” to the notion that the workers’ paradise will lose the mechanisms of the state – but this is to render the theory “unfalsifiable” according to Popper, which still relegates it from the world of scientific theory.

Yet just because something is "falsifiable" doesn’t mean it is false, just that it can be tested and potentially disproved by observable experiments. However, it is a hurdle that most political theories failed to overcome – most either failing falsifiability tests or ducking them – although it must be stressed it doesn’t render them pointless or false. They may still be valid treatise on the perfectibility – or otherwise – of man. But, importantly, they are not science and should not be treated as such. Certainly, Popper wasn’t condemning unfalsifiable theories, just stating that they were non-scientific. For example, he stated that religious ideas have cultural or spiritual meaning and that people were entitled to believe them, especially if it brought them some comfort. But they were not and could not be scientifically proven, which matters in terms of claims regarding the “truth” of any hypothesis.

In my view the self-help industry would be revolutionized by a swift application of Popperian rigour. Almost all the “guaranteed” cures and methodologies – often wrapped up in fantastically pseudo-scientific language – would be rendered “unfalsifiable” and therefore unscientific. Valuable they may be to those they give comfort, but science – at least according to Karl Popper – they ain’t.

So where does this leave us in terms of seeking a cure for fear of failure, or any other fear of emotion-based condition? Potentially in a better place, in my opinion. With no guaranteed cure available, maybe we are – according to Pearsall – able to develop a better perspective, although not necessarily a more positive one. Indeed, constantly “thinking positively” about tomorrow robs us of the joys or critical thinking and of fully experiencing today, he says. Instead of “self-absorption” via all-embracing philosophies or techniques, he suggests we develop the seven more critical attributes of a healthy personality:

1. Be sceptical,
2. Be willing to deceive yourself, especially in favour of loved ones,
3. Embrace the craziness that is your family,
4. Workaholism is not necessarily bad for you if you’re doing something you love,
5. Obsessing about your health isn’t good for your health,
6. Realise its impossible to stay young forever and get on with the rest of your life,
7. Death is not the enemy. It is just another part of life – deal with it.

And while these seven attributes may not be Popperian in their falsifiability – in fact Pearsall makes no claim to be scientific – they at least take the world as it is and therefore have some grounding in reality, which in the self-help industry is progress indeed.

Creative disruption - or coping with corporate fear of failure

Can companies suffer from fear of failure? Absolutely. In fact it is a major theme of one of the world’s most respected corporate gurus: Tom Peters. Corporate fear of failure is something he rails against in all his works and certainly in his most famous book: In Search of Excellence (written with Robert H. Waterman Jr. in 1982). According to Peters, fear of failure is the principal cause of paralysis in companies, whether it is the receptionist or the CEO.

To overcome this he recommends that companies adopt a culture of failure. He wants to encourage failure because, without it, companies stop growing. They shun innovation, he says, and instead become smug and arrogant – and they are usually riding for a fall.

According to Peters some of the most innovative companies even build failure into their business model. For instance 3M (inventors of the Post-it Note and much else besides) guarantees product managers the ability to run with their inventions backed up by a commitment to total job security should it fail.

And Peters was writing before the Internet – or even the PC – had utterly changed the business landscape: two technological revolutions that were to catch smug or arrogant companies completely off-guard.

Simon Waldman is a Tom Peters for the dotcom era – surveying the carnage of the past 20-years on the traditional corporate landscape and offering his own recently-published version of In Search of Excellence called Creative Disruption (FT Prentice Hall).

Waldman’s case studies include newspaper groups adapting (or not) to the Internet such as Johnston Press and the New York Times Company, IT companies coping (or not) with the PC such as IBM and Apple, and retailers struggling with music downloading such as HMW. Yet my favourite case study is the one most likely, when thinking about the Internet, to induce a wince or even a refrain such as “ouch” or even the question “do they still exist?”: Encyclopædia Britannica.

Despite its name (it was founded in Scotland in 1768), by the 20th century Encyclopædia Britannica was largely a US operation. And, according to Waldman, its 1900-1980s model of commission-based door-to-door selling of the 30-volume encyclopedias priced at $1,000 (“a small price to pay for a child’s education”) was an absolute sitting duck for the innovations of the 1990s and 2000s.

Yet the business was ravaged long before the Internet took hold in the late 1990s. What did for EB was the arrival of the CD-rom at the beginning of that decade. Microsoft’s Encarta sold at a fraction of the price of EB’s leather-backed volumes and was, ultimately, given away free with every new PC. As Waldman states: “parents decided in droves that if they were going to spend $1,000 on their children’s education it would be better spent on a PC than an encyclopedia – especially if the PC came with a free copy of Encarta”.

What’s interesting here, from a fear of failure perspective, is that Encyclopædia Britannica had launched their own CD-rom version back in 1989, although had made too major errors when doing so, both based on the classic avoidance-thinking of those with high fear of failure. First, to protect the Encyclopædia Britannica brand they launched it via a secondary brand of the company: Comptons, which had nowhere near the cache of the EB name. Second, again to protect the brand – as well as to keep the door-to-door sales team happy – they priced the CD-rom at a near-fatal $895.

Both mistakes were a form of denial regarding the impact of the digital world. Encyclopædia Britannica was a beautiful physical product sold by pounding the sidewalks of suburban America. The senior management – many of whom had come up through the sales force – could not envision a world beyond this, and therefore embraced the new technology not so much with reluctance but from a position of avoidance: as if trying to prove right their original thinking (that the physical product remained preferable).

According to Robert McHenry, the company’s former editor-in-chief, the business suffered due to “the inability of the company’s senior management to embrace electronic publishing and pursue it forcefully”.

As Waldman states, “they were hardly alone among executives of the time overestimating our [i.e. the consumer’s] devotion to physical forms of content”, although this is an extreme case – those gorgeous leather-bound volumes being matchless, surely, against the soulless clicking and keyboard monotony of the PC?

The company finally embraced “the future” by first creating a two-disc CD-rom and, later, a subscription-based web version of the encyclopedia – in the process dismantling the door-to-door sales team and support structure (with 2,000 redundancies).

But, of course, the future was again changing. Indeed, it’s the advent of Wikipedia that drives the average person’s assumption that Encyclopædia Britannica is a long-dead proposition. Yet it was Encarta that destroyed sales volumes for EB – with revenues dropping by around 80% from their peak in the early 1990s.

In fact, Wikipedia did something far worse to Encyclopædia Britannica. According to Waldman it profoundly damaged the old player’s reputation. Wikipedia is the opposite to a hierarchical, self-regarding, absolutist and somewhat-fusty institution. It is a bottom-up, wisdom-of-crowds, open, democratic and liberating embodiment of the Internet. And if this meant a major compromise with respect to quality, a December 2005 “special report” by Nature magazine proved not by stating that, in terms of the level of errors within randomly chosen articles, the two were pretty comparable.

Given this, it is, indeed, a wonder Encyclopædia Britannica is still with us. Yet, astonishingly, Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. is now a profitable company with 85% of its revenues earned digitally, especially from the education and library markets that still dislike the free-for-all chaos of Wikipedia. That said, the business is a fraction of its former size (employing 240 people compared to well over 2,000 at its peak) and has been radically overhauled as a source for web-wary parents and teachers, rather than as the primary reference for the knowledge-thirsty children of the English-speaking world.

According to Waldman, as the digital revolutions got underway Encyclopædia Britannica decided to become a shrinking encyclopedia business rather than the expanding education business it belatedly became. And this, in my view, is a classic case of corporate fear of failure. Relying on existing strengths rather than scanning and embracing future potential; dismissing innovation as a “flash in the pan” rather than as an avenue for expansion worth exploring; and approaching new products and markets with the reluctance of the fearful rather than the excitement of the dynamic – perhaps even using snobbery as an avoidance tactic – all are traits of corporate seizure brought about by fear.

Finally in 2008 Encyclopædia Britannica announced that it would open itself up to Wikipedia-style contributions. It also placed much of its content online for free, although still largely as a hook for potential subscribers. A little late, perhaps, but after its decimation as a business, the digital age had arrived at Encyclopædia Britannica. So why had it taken so long?

“The truth was,” concludes Waldman, “that they had acknowledged this much [i.e. the need for change] earlier, but making it happen had been a formidably challenging process.”

Peters would surely nod in recognition here: that a successful (perhaps even self-satisfied) company fears a future that arrives too quickly – turning them into a “catch-up” organization as each innovation takes them a step further from their traditional model. Indeed, perhaps all companies are destined to this fateful cycle – of being cutting-edge innovators at their birth (admittedly this was in the 1760s in the case of EB), and staid innovation-deniers, as well as defenders of the status-quo, in their dotage. The only alternative is, like 3M and some of Waldman’s more innovative case studies (Apple and the Washington Post Company included), to create a culture where the potential for failure is not only tolerated, but embraced as part of the process.