Ep 26. Be Afraid - Dirty Chai with Chio

The podcast discusses the misconception that successful people are not afraid. The host uses examples from Adam Grant's book, "The Originals," to debunk this narrative. He explains that many successful individuals, such as Stephen Wozniak, John Legend, Bill Gates, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., experienced fear and uncertainty but pursued their goals anyway. The host emphasizes that being cautious and hedging bets does not decrease the chances of success. He also mentions that according to Adam Grant's research, 33% of entrepreneurs who kept their jobs were more likely to succeed. The host aims to demystify success and show that ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things despite their fears. He concludes by sharing a story about Michelle Obama, highlighting that success is attainable for anyone willing to face their fears. Hello, hi, welcome to this week's installment of the Dirty Tide podcast with me, your host, Shiyam. Today's podcast will be focused on holistic professional and personal success by growing and developing the common denominator to all your successes, all your failures, and everything in between. You. It's about the mindset, emotional regulation, and the intentional personal development that underpins holistic success. Today's installment is titled, Be Afraid. Yes, I said, Be Afraid, rather than Don't Be Afraid, and that is by design. I'll tell you why, and stick with me for this, because I think it's worthwhile. This installment is inspired by Adam Grant's book, The Originals, and there is a quote that I thought was very apt for this. It's from H.P. Lovecroft, and it goes, The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown. We have all been afraid at different times. Some of us may even be afraid now, and the general narrative around success is that you shouldn't be afraid. The common narrative around success is you shouldn't be afraid of being killed if you're braveheart. You shouldn't be afraid of diving into the unknown. You shouldn't be afraid of giving up everything and going for the thing that you want, but that narrative is not entirely accurate or appropriate in real life. The narrative around fear is almost as though the people who go on to do extraordinary things are very different from the ordinary person, that they are completely unafraid, that they are iconoclasts, they are revolutionaries, they spit in the face of fear. They are not afraid. That is the narrative that we have been fed, but is it true? I think it tells an extraordinary story, right? I think the idea of people not being afraid makes a story sound better. It makes it sound supernatural. It makes it seem like these people are ethereal beings with divine powers, and that is good for a story, but in real life, is this true? I think this is what Adam Grant's purpose is to debunk, and I think he successfully does so in his book, The Original. In his book, he argues that the people that we have been told were not afraid were actually afraid, were actually terrified. The only difference is they did the things anyway. Every time he gives a talk or he starts telling the story of what ordinary people behind extraordinary success are like, he gives a very personal example, and I'm always amused by it. Adam Grant is successful in his own right. He is an internationally recognized authority on industrial psychology. He is with Wharton University, and obviously, he's written a few number one selling books. He obviously has a little bit of money, and because he has money, he was approached by a couple of his students to invest in the idea, and then he, based on his idea, as we have been sold it, of what success looked like, said to him, asked them the following question. So, did you guys work on this idea throughout summer? No, no. They said they took summer internships, you know, that aligned with what they were studying at the time. They were just working on this in the evenings and in the mornings. Okay. That doesn't sound very committed, he thought. Is your website ready? Are you good to go? No. They're still working on the website, trying to work out a few kinks, testing it here and there to see how it's going to work. Okay. Do you have a name? No. We don't have a name yet, but we know we're going to choose something that is neutral, that has no association with anything at present. We're just playing around with a few names at the moment. He thought to myself, these are not committed people. This is not the archetype of a successful entrepreneur. These are students who are playing at being entrepreneurs. He decided not to invest. Those students went on to found Wabi Parker. Wabi Parker not only disrupted an entire industry, the founders are now billionaires. The company is worth over a billion dollars because it was a brilliant idea. It just wasn't wearing the clothes that people would typically associate with what will become a brilliant idea because of this narrative that we have been sold. We have been sold this narrative that the people who will ultimately be successful look a certain way. They're not afraid to quit everything. They're not afraid to jump, but Adam disproves this and he gives examples that we know of people that we know. Let's start with Stephen Wozniak. Stephen Wozniak, after creating Apple with Steve Jobs, kept his job at Hewlett-Packard for two years after they had started. He hedged his bets. He knew they had created something great and he invested his time in it, but he did not give up everything for it immediately. That's an important thing to understand because you do not have to give up everything for your idea immediately. John Legend released his first album in the year 2000. He continued to work as a management consultant until 2002. He wasn't living out of the boot of his car. He wasn't homeless. He wasn't discovered after giving up everything and going broke and about to try to cash his last check. No, he had a day job and he kept his day job while he worked on his dream. His day job funded his day-to-day needs while he worked on funding his passion. Bill Gates, contrary to popular belief, didn't just drop out of school. He actually stayed in school for a bit and continued to work on his idea. He stayed in school for a while after writing his first piece of software and then when he thought, maybe this thing might take off, what should I do? He didn't actually just drop out of school. First, he organized some money to live off of for a couple of years, then he went to the school and he organized a leave of absence and made sure that his credits were preserved in case he needed to come back. That's planning. That's a person who is afraid of failure but makes a plan for it. The idea that a person just drops everything and runs off and gets successful is such a fallacy and it's interfering with people's ability to use common sense in pursuit of their dreams. Abraham Lincoln was actually known generally as a people pleaser and he was conflict avoidant, which is contrary to the narrative that is commonly told. You see, his story is told from one side but it's not told from the other. He agonized. His journals will tell you that he agonized over the idea of freeing the slaves for six months. He was afraid of what it would do. He was afraid it would rip apart the country. He was afraid it would cause civil war. He was afraid that it would anger a lot of people who supported him and his fear wasn't unfounded. I mean, he was assassinated for it but having agonized over all of these things and weighed the pros and cons and considered all the things, he then decided that it was worthwhile to do it anyway and then he did it but he was afraid anyway. He was responsible ultimately for the final signature that freed millions of people but he was afraid when he did it is the point. Martin Luther King, according to his journals, just wanted to be a pastor. He just wanted to be a preacher. That's all he wanted. The I Have a Dream speech was one he gave full of fear. In the run up to giving the speech, he was deathly afraid. He tinkered. He sat with his advisors. He wanted to know whether this was a speech he could give. The words were tweaked. He was still asking for advice a couple of hours before he gave the speech. He stayed up almost the entire night the night before. While he was sitting down waiting to be introduced to give the speech, he was still tinkering with it and fiddling with it. He wasn't there sitting sure that he was about to give a speech that would be heard around the world. He wasn't sitting there knowing that he would give a speech that would change the world. He wasn't there sitting thinking that he would give a speech that someone in Africa would come to know of and would quote and would admire. He didn't know any of that. He was just about to give a speech that was contrary to the laws and the ideas of the time and he knew what a danger that posed and he knew what a risk that was and ultimately he also lost his life. He was afraid when he did the thing that turned out to be extraordinary. He experienced ordinary fear but he did an extraordinary thing. This is so important because you need to understand that the fact that you are afraid, the fact that you want to hedge your bets, the fact that you want to be cautious, the fact that you want to approach something with sense and sensibility does not mean you have a lesser chance of succeeding at all. In fact, according to Adam Grant's research, 33% of entrepreneurs who kept their job and hedged their bets were more likely to succeed in their entrepreneurial endeavor. That's a huge number. It's a huge number. Let me tell you about Michelle Obama and I'm telling you stories because stories are a doorway into connection. Stories are what tell us that we can be like the next person. The danger of just getting a headline or just getting a tale of the deed and not the story behind it is we form our own story and we create a story that is unattainable for us sometimes based on the narrative that we've been sold and what I'm trying to tell you, what I'm trying to do is demystify success. You would have noticed that I've updated the tagline of the podcast to demystifying success because it shouldn't be a mystery. It's that mystery that makes it seem like it's unattainable for the person next door, the person like you and me. When it is truly, truly, fully attainable, when it is truly an ordinary person like you or me who can set out to do something extraordinary, be afraid in that set out and still do it. Let's talk briefly about Michelle Obama. Michelle Obama, there's a story that goes around the internet and it's a true story of how she rocked up to an interview with her baby and she was like, this is me, take me as I am, right? And it's a beautiful story. But when she breaks down the story from her perspective in her book and in various interviews, you realize there is much more to it. On the day of the interview, when the day started, she didn't think that that was what she was going to do. On the day of the interview, she had organized a nanny. She and Obama were in a difficult stage of their marriage. They've been very open about needing marriage counseling and the fact that they were not doing very well with managing parenting and how it disrupted their lives and the normal marital strife that happens in the early stages of parenting and building a family together. Michelle Obama was working a lot and she was doing more of all the home stuff. And she was, I don't know, let me not go down the particular road. If you want the details of that, they're available on the internet. What matters is this. So in the morning, she wakes up. She's going through a lot as most working moms or working parents go through. She's got her young baby. She's ready to go back to work. She's got an interview. She's called a nanny. She's organized what she needs to organize. The one child's gone to school and then she gets a call from the nanny and the nanny says she can't make it anymore. But the interview is still on. What was she to do? There's no one to leave the baby with. No one lived close enough. And she said it was either she didn't go or she went with the baby. There were really no options. In a moment of desperation, she was just like, you know what, life happens. And I know those moments. I know those moments because I have been there too. And probably if you're a parent, so have you. There was a time I took my baby to a meeting, my newborn baby, and I was literally breastfeeding the baby while briefing this man. But it wasn't because I was special. We went on to do great things together. It was our first meeting and I actually called him to cancel. So let me take a step back because, ah, God, let me take a step back. So I was a young executive. I just had a baby. I was very keen to not be derailed by parenting in achieving my goals. When I say just had a baby, my baby was maybe six months old. I had this meeting set up. I had been given the HR portfolio. And the biggest problem at that time was the teams were fragmented. Everybody hated everybody else. And it was trying to bring everybody together, not necessarily changing policy, et cetera, but to try and fix the relationships. That's what I was going for. To try and get everyone to a point where they were just open to this idea that things could be fixed. Right. I found someone who I thought could help me do that, that had a program that looked like it could achieve this. I reached out to him. We had difficulty getting, aligning our calendars. There was a lot going on in my life because I was responsible for multiple portfolios. But we finally got it right. We set up a meeting. It was him and the HR manager at the time, myself, and we were going to meet at our offices. My nanny picked that day to not show up. She said she was having problems with taxis. To be honest, she was quite lackadaisical about time. She really, like time was a suggestion to her. We had to sort that out eventually. But then my nanny's running late. Then she calls after about an hour, but this is the frustrating thing. She kept saying she's five minutes away, five minutes away. Then after about an hour, she says, actually, she thinks she'll only arrive after one, which was catastrophic because the meeting was at 10. So I reached out, and I was married at the time, but my spouse and I were also in a difficult time, and we weren't really aligned on this career story. A topic for another episode, because at some point we're going to need to discuss Sheryl Sandberg's sentiment that there is no such thing as career success if you do not have a spouse betting in the same direction. And I think that's a fair point. One of the most important career decisions you ultimately make is who you're married to. But that's a topic for another day. So I called this guy, and I called the HR manager, and I said, guys, this is what's going on. I think I might have to cancel the meeting, but I don't know when we're going to reschedule it because this thing needs to happen on Monday next week. This man said, say no more, I'll come to your house. And he brought with him, and the HR manager said, she'll come to my house. We had this meeting at my dining table, and I would get up, put the baby on my back when he was crying. He was hit a little bit of a fever. I would treat him, I would feed him, and we came up with a whole new plan, with a whole plan for how we were going to turn things around in the eight hours of that day. And it was a cool, but it was unpleasant. I did not for a second not feel afraid, not feel embarrassed. I felt all of those things. We just got on with it anyway, and we achieved it. I'll never forget, two weeks later, it was the two or three of the directors holding my hands and crying, and saying they've never experienced anything like this. And it was all worth it. But in that moment where they say they've never experienced anything like this, you don't consider how afraid I was, how shattered, how stressed my nerves were, how stressed I was, and how shattered my nerves were, in trying to get to that point. And the fact is, any ordinary person would feel the same way. It is not an indication of weakness. It is not an indication that you're not meant for great things. It is an indication that you are a human being, having a natural response to a difficult situation. And that was the point Michelle Obama was making as well. Michelle Obama was saying, showing up with her baby was a moment of desperation by an ordinary mother that ultimately came across as extraordinary to people who were looking on, and ultimately, perhaps, gave permission to other people to do the same thing in their moment of desperation, but to get on with it anyway. And that is what makes it truly, truly extraordinary. I could go on and on with examples, but there is the ultimate example. The ultimate example is Jesus. Jesus, in the Christian faith, is God's Son. And He came to earth to save all of us by dying on the cross. And He became human in order to achieve that. The Bible that so many of us believe in, the faith that so many of us believe in, is very clear that as a human, as the moment of His capture and ultimate death approached, and He knew what that moment was, what was Jesus doing in the garden of Gethsemane? I have never known how to pronounce it. Every preacher pronounces it differently, but let me say Gethsemane. In that garden, what was He feeling when He was asking God to let this cup pass Him by? He was feeling fear. He was feeling fear because He had taken on a human form and all the feelings that come with being human. If Jesus Himself, knowing the triumph that would come after He had experienced this thing, knowing what the mission was, still felt enough fear to say to God, is it possible for us to skip this part? Who are you to think that you can look at your fear and simply say to it, disappear in the puff of smoke? That fear is what makes you human. That fear is what makes you the very essence of who you are, and that fear is a guiding light, a tool, an essential part. Don't look at it as the enemy. You see, people confuse moving first and moving fearlessly with winning. First mover advantage is actually a myth, and this has been proven multiple times. Otherwise Hi5 would have survived Facebook, otherwise Blackberry would have survived Samsung and Apple. First mover advantage is simply the person who does it first, but the people who take their time to figure out how they can make it last, the people who hedge their bets, the people who shake the tree, the people who allow feelings like caution and emotion to temper hubris and hard-headed go-getting, those are the ones who stay the course. Those are the ones who win in the long term. Originals are people who are afraid, but they do it anyway. The idea is that they harness the fear to prepare, to plan, to try, and then to execute with finesse, and then to adapt as they go along, to work out, this isn't working. Let's do it this way. Entrepreneurs who kept their job while starting a business on the side were 33% more likely to succeed. Research shows you're more likely to succeed when you are being cautious than when you are being a free-willing gambler. If you are a fan of the Marvel Universe, you might understand this example, but Tony Stark is the one who's more likely to figure out the problem. Tony Stark, who is just as intelligent as Dr. Bruce Banner, is more likely to figure out a permanent solution than Dr. Bruce Banner, because Dr. Bruce Banner, in response to a difficulty, resorts to brute strength. He might be brilliant, but he resorts to slashing things and that sort of thing. But when Tony is faced with an issue, he works out the science behind it. He works out how do I approach it, and how do we fix it, and what's going to happen after. The two of them may be equally intelligent and intelligent in different ways, but the two of them achieve results that have different longevity. So it's not in spite of fear that extraordinary people, or the people that we then go on to call extraordinary or original, succeed, but because of it. You see, someone says of Abraham Lincoln, he was one of you, but he became Abraham Lincoln. It is simply the same for you. You are you, but you are also extraordinary. It is simply a question of whether you allow the fear to paralyze you, or you allow the fear to do what it comes to do, to help you check your blind spots, to help you see what's working and what's not working, and why. It's the same starting line. Those people who have achieved these extraordinary things are not superhuman. They are just as human as you. It's not about whether or not you feel fear. You should feel fear. If you're not afraid, you're not human. If you're not afraid, something is broken. You should feel fear. You should do it anyway. Elon Musk, when asked what he thought about his first landing or, you know, sending their first spaceship out, he thought it wouldn't come back. He thought it wouldn't succeed. He really thought they would fail on that particular mission. And he was asked, so why did you do it if you thought it wasn't going to succeed? And he said, because it was too important not to try. Ask yourself what's too important for you not to try, and then plan. Listen to what your fear is suggesting that you check. Check those things. Hedge your bets. Keep your day job, if you must, because you have normal day-to-day needs, and then go and execute. That is where the beginning of extraordinary is. We all are ordinary people with the capacity to do extraordinary things. Have a beautiful week. Thank you for joining me. Please rate the podcast. Please leave me a review, either on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or on any of the podcast listening channels, because it's really good for the algorithm. It really helps me get more exposure. It helps the podcast get suggested more. I am truly appreciative of every person. I think there were a few tens of people who had this podcast as their top podcast of the year. I am truly grateful for that. It blows my mind. The podcast is only about six months old. It's my baby pod. I so enjoy it. It's something I hope to be doing as a passion project, even many years from now. I am truly grateful for anyone and everyone who spends their time here with me, because you could use it for something else. Thank you so much. Please like, share, subscribe. I will see you next week. Have a blessed week, and create something beautiful.