How Great Entrepreneurs Use Fear To Succeed: Lessons From Billion-Dollar Entrepreneurs In his first inaugural address at the onset of the Great Depression,

President Franklin D. Roosevelt uttered one of the more memorable lines

of the English language, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The

reason this line resonates through the generations is because fear can

paralyze us. Many of my students tell me that they stay in their stifling

corporate jobs and do not pursue their dream because they fear failure

(and the loss of health insurance). Many of the entrepreneurs I have

talked to, and worked with, told me that their first step, when they first

put their necks on the line, was the most difficult.

I interviewed Gustavo Cisneros who is one of eight children of Diego

Cisneros. Diego Cisneros built a business empire in Venezuela. When it

came time for Diego Cisneros to appoint a successor, he picked Gustavo

Cisneros, who amply justified his father’s confidence in him and led the

Cisneros Group from one of Venezuela’s great companies to one of the

world’s great ones. Continuing his family tradition of picking the next-

generation leader, Cisneros picked his daughter Adriana from among his

three children. When I asked Gustavo Cisneros why his father had picked

him, and why he picked his daughter, he answered “because I am fearless,

and she is the same.”

Do you have to be fearless or is fear

actually a good motivator? Fear of

failure can encourage you to evaluate

major risks and find ways to reduce

them. Fear can encourage

entrepreneurs to form alliances and

develop strategies to improve the odds

of success. Fear can spur us to work

harder, learn more, and manage

better. Mark Cuban uses the fear of

failure and his desire to win to motivate himself, and Lew Frankfort

insists on an “enormous amount of research” before launching a new

enterprise within Coach COH +1.26%. And by fearless, does Cisneros mean

fearless after preparation, or fearless without it?

To understand this, it helps to know the level of planning and analysis

Cisneros undertakes BEFORE launching major endeavors. As an example,

before he purchased the deteriorating Univision from Hallmark and built

it into a powerhouse with two partners, he did the following:

He understood the weakness of Telemundo, his key competitor for the U.S.

Hispanic market

He knew his partner Emilio Azcárraga Milmo from their previous work together

and understood his strengths

He knew that they needed an American partner who was an expert on American

television, and picked Jerry Perenchio, who had owned the station where

Cisneros’s manager had worked

He knew that both he and Azcárraga Milmo had content from their TV companies

in Mexico, Central and South America, and they could channel these shows into

Univision. As Pablo Bachelet (Cisneros’s biographer) notes, content is to TV as

water is to land, and the two partners had plenty of content between them. So

they were leveraging their assets.

He worked for almost a year to get both partners in the deal and spent that time

to develop an agreement that was a “hedge against the bad tempers of his

partners” (from Bachelet’s book).

Based on my interviews with, and analysis of, the practices of Cisneros,

here are some suggestions to overcome fear:

Do your due diligence and understand everything that can go wrong

Develop strategies to minimize the risk of failure

Understand and leverage your competitive advantage to stack the odds in your

favor

Get the right ingredients and partners, perhaps those with whom you have

worked before, to know why you will succeed even before you start

Launch with full intensity and courage.

MY TAKE: Get started on your dream when the pain of inaction exceeds

the fear of action. As Tom Robbins noted in “Even Cowgirls get the Blues,”

“Heaven is living in your hopes, and hell is living in your fears.” It is

difficult to conquer your inner demons, and one of the worst demons is

fear. Are great entrepreneurs fearless? What I have found is that the

common factor among most billion-dollar entrepreneurs, and especially

the ones I interviewed, is that they started when they found their passion,

which helps to overcome fear. Usually they were young, but age was not a

barrier. Col. Sanders was said to be in his 60s when he started KFC. Fear

can be good if you prepare for it, understand the situation, reduce risks,

develop your strength, test your advantage, and use this confidence to

jump in. During the Cuban struggle for independence, Emilio Bacardi (in

their ads) noted that “if we have to die, so then we die.” My suggestion –

do not die before you are dead.