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CHAPTER 7: HANDS IN THE AIR

TERROR IS PART OF THE THRILL (NO, REALLY).

The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety. -Johann von Goethe

Iremember my first ride on Space Mountain in Disneyland like it was yesterday. Normally I don’t have much of a memory for these kinds of things, but this ride stuck with me.

I didn’t like it. At all.

The reason was simple: No one warned me.

I was just making my way through the park, lining up for one ride after another. I had no clue this one would change me—forever.

It was the summer of 1979, and I was eight years old. The park was so hot I thought my Vans were going to melt right off my feet. Space Mountain was jam-packed, and I was trying to cool down in the line outside by eating a blueberry snow cone. It wasn’t working. I was cooking as the line slowly snaked its way to the entrance.

At last, I reached the interior of the massive, futuristic building, and the hot sun was replaced by black lighting that made my white tank top glow in the near-darkness inside. When we finally reached the “Space Port,” I said goodbye to the last of my snow cone and stepped on board my “rocket”—the Disney-fied roller coaster car that would be my spaceship for the next few minutes.

The rocket shuttled from the loading area to mission control, and an attendant checked my lap bar. I flashed my bravest blueberry-stained smile to prove I wasn’t scared. And then… nothing. We just sat there, painfully awaiting our turn, while the butterflies—and, to my dismay, the snow cone—started to stir in my stomach.

No problem, I told myself. I got this.

I had just conquered the Matterhorn, after all. This ride wasn’t nearly as big. How bad could it be?

I was about to find out.

With a jerk, the rocket was released in a kaleidoscope of red strobe lights. We turned and made a small climb through a tunnel of flashing blue lights, another easy turn, and then more climbing.

It’s just another roller coaster, I chanted.

Then the lights went out and all hell broke loose.

The interior of Space Mountain is essentially a hollow, dark shell. Everything is pitch black, except for the thousands upon thousands of stars and comets scattered across the “sky.” I barely had time to marvel at the illusion of being in outer space before my rocket fell into a death drop. I was plastered back into my seat until the wild free fall was broken by a hard right turn, then a yank to the left, each one smashing my head off the backrest.

I was starting to panic. By the wise old age of eight, I considered myself a roller coaster connoisseur, but this was something else entirely. I had no way to brace myself for what was coming next because I couldn’t see what was coming next! In utter darkness, my rocket plunged into a series of tight right turns, going faster and faster. Right then, I was convinced I was going to die. At eight years old, Darren Hardy, fearless ride master, was about to die screaming in outer space.

Just when things couldn’t get worse, I was yanked by a sudden left turn and a drop that sent the butterflies in my stomach into revolt. Half of my snow cone came back up and onto my white tank top. Now I wasn’t just going to die, I was going to die in shame.

About the time I was wondering if the undertaker would tidy me up before carrying me away, the rocket slid into the re-entry tunnel and braked hard. A light flashed—probably a camera to capture my blueberry-stained embarrassment—and the ride made its final turn into mission control. The music faded.

It was over. I did it. And I was still alive.

THE THRILL OF A LIFETIME

For me, Space Mountain was—and is—much scarier than any other ride. Unable to see what’s ahead, it’s impossible to prepare yourself for what comes next. The unexpected turns and drops feel more severe, and the speed feels dangerous, life-threatening even—always plunging into the unknown and facing (seemingly) certain doom.

This, of course, is exactly what it feels like to be an entrepreneur.

A normal roller coaster—like a normal life—can be scary enough. But a ride done in the dark transforms the experience from scary to downright terrifying.

But it’s also part of what makes it so awesome.

To this day if I ever find myself at Disneyland, the first thing I do is head up Main Street and cut to the right to ride Space Mountain.

It still scares the bejesus out of me.

And I absolutely love it.

If you become an entrepreneur, you’re going to face fear. You’re going to be scared. You are going to come face-to-face with daily uncertainty and wonder if your “rocket” is going to derail and if you will die a sudden death. And you’re going to do all that, in the dark, with the added risk of public humiliation if you puke a little on yourself.

Facing those things is nonnegotiable. Once you start, you don’t get to choose a ride that won’t cause you fear. But you can choose to face that fear head on, and, like your own personal Space Mountain, even learn to love it.

In this chapter, I am going to help you do just that.

FACING DOWN FEAR

I was once told the story of a wise elder walking through a graveyard with his young apprentice. The elder proclaimed, “The world’s greatest entrepreneur is buried in this cemetery. Can you pick him out?” After a short search, the young apprentice found the grandest head-stone and pointed to it. “It must be him, right?” “No,” said the elder. “It’s the one you are standing on.”

The young apprentice looked under his feet. The tombstone was hardly visible and barely marked.

“He lived and died never making more than $30,000 a year,” said the elder. “He never had the courage to become an entrepreneur, but had he faced his fears, he would have been the greatest.” Most people never live up to the potential they have been given. The results they produce and the life they experience are only a tiny fraction of what they are truly capable of. Why? What stops us?

Only one thing: fear.

Fear can stifle, block, and bury your potential. Most people who never step up to ride the entrepreneur roller coaster resist because they believe that entrepreneurs are fearless, courageous risk-takers who never doubt themselves.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Every great entrepreneur starts out scared. Every one. Richard Branson started out scared. Bill Gates started out scared. So did every seemingly heroic figure who makes it to the cover of SUCCESS. One hundred percent of them started out scared.

Courage is not the absence of fear—it’s feeling the fear and proceeding anyway. As Nelson Mandela said, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” The entrepreneurs who make it are brave not because of the absence of fear, but because they put one foot in front of the other and face down that fear every day.

So how do you do it? It begins with understanding what’s really going on when you feel fear.

FEAR IS NOT REAL

Sure, it feels real—the pounding heart, knocking knees, and sweaty palms. Those are real enough symptoms, but the thing we’re actually afraid of is an illusion, an invention of the mind.

Ultimately, a spider can’t make you scared. A prospecting call can’t make you scared. The only thing that can make you scared is how your mind interprets those things. Fear is a phenomenon that resides entirely within your own brain. It’s the mind that gives every interpretation meaning—it’s your mind that conjures the negative emotion.

“Fear is not real. It’s an illusion, a phenomenon that resides entirely within your own brain.” @DarrenHardy JoinTheRide

Fear itself doesn’t actually exist.

Fear is not real.

This is why one person can look over the edge of a cliff and be gripped by a fear of heights while another finds great joy in cliff-diving or jumping out of an airplane. The reality is the same, but the mind’s interpretation and the emotion it generates are different.

Two people can be looking at the same dog—a German shepherd, let’s say—sitting there quietly. One person sees it, interprets threat and danger, and feels fear. The other person sees the dog and interprets affection, tenderness, and protection. Instead of fear, this person feels love. The same dog, but two wildly different interpretations and emotional responses—all generated exclusively by the mind.

Why is this? What’s happening?

OUR ANCIENT BRAIN

What we call “modern times” make up the last 6,000 years or so, dating back to the start of recorded history. Six millennia may seem like a long time, but mankind has been around for much, much longer.

For hundreds of thousands of years before that—what we might call “primitive times”—humans were still around but under very different circumstances.

During those primitive years, our brains had to be on constant alert in order to protect us from some serious threats—lions and cougars hidden in the brush, leopards stalking from the trees, even attacks from neighboring tribes. With danger lurking behind every corner, it was the humans with the brains that best monitored and most quickly responded to threats who survived to reproduce. If you were slow on the threat-sensing, you were lunch. The stakes were high, and by necessity, as a species we became very good at identifying threats and responding to them.

In today’s times we are not under the same sort of constant mortal threat in our day-to-day environment. But much of our primitive brain is still here, operating at full throttle. It’s still doing its job, triggering the same nervous system responses to threats. The only problem is now, instead of lions and cougars and leopards, our nervous system has identified something else as a threat.

The fear and flight response signals the brain gave our ancestors when they were face to face with a roaring lion are the same signals we now feel when we look at a telephone before making a prospecting call. The fear and panic brain response that was caused when a small warrior tribe attacked our ancient relatives is the very same brain response we feel when standing in front of a small group to give a presentation. The same nervous and alarm signals that the primitive brain gave our ancestors when they stood vulnerable and exposed on an open plain is the very same mechanism that is responsible for how we feel when we stand on stage in front of a large group.

This is why we have disproportionate fear responses to inane modern activities. We’re using a primitive tool to run a modern-day life.

And that means it’s time to modernize your brain.

SIX BRAIN HACKS TO CONQUER FEAR

So, your brain has a mind of its own—literally. Unfortunately, you’re kind of stuck with the original, outdated equipment. Although you can’t change the evolution of your ancient mind, you can short-circuit its primitive tendencies by hacking it.

Here are six brain hacks to bring your brain back from the Stone Age and into the age of high-tech tools and roller coaster businesses.

1. GET REAL

The first thing to do is to gain perspective. You want to separate reality from fantasy. It’s not a lion—it’s a phone. If you dial it and the other person answers, they can’t eat you. If you stand in front of a small group, they are not going to pillage your village. If you stand alone onstage to give a presentation, the audience is not going to attack you. You are in no mortal danger.

A good question to ask yourself before doing anything you think you fear is, “If I do this, am I going to die?” If the answer is no, then your fear is made up, grossly overdramatic, and it should have no power over you.

1. IT’S THE FEAR OF FEAR YOU FEAR

Oddly, it’s not even calling a stranger or making a speech that generates our fear, it’s the anticipation of doing it—which is, once again, an illusion of the mind.

In the 1960s, a researcher named Seymour Epstein got curious about skydivers. He fitted novice parachutists with heart rate monitors that measured their pulses as their plane climbed toward the release point. He found that—as you might expect—while still safe inside the plane, a jumper’s heart rate got faster and faster as the plane ascended. The higher the plane went, the higher the anxiety.

What he didn’t expect to find, however, was that once they threw themselves out the door of the plane and started hurtling toward the Earth with only a few thin cords and a glorified bedsheet to keep them from impending doom, their heart rates declined dramatically, and they admitted to quite enjoying themselves.

The most stressful part of the entire experience was the illusion of how frightening the event would be or, in other words, the anticipation of fear. Once the reality of the event took over, the fear vanished.

This “pre-fear” is what happens before you pick up the phone, before you go on stage, and before you walk across the room to introduce yourself to a stranger. It’s the anticipation of fear kicking in—your ancient mind’s illusion. Once you are engaged in the activity, your brain realizes you are not toe-to-toe with a predator, this is not the primitive mortal threat you feared it would be, and it turns off the fear response.

Just remember: The fear itself hurts more than the thing you’re scared of.

“It’s the fear of fear you fear. The fear itself hurts more than the thing you are scared of.” @DarrenHardy JoinTheRide

1. TWENTY SECONDS OF COURAGE

Courage is overrated. Or, at least overestimated. You don’t need to be brave all day, every day to be successful.

In fact, you barely have to be courageous at all.

According to my calculations, you can be a coward 99.9305556 percent of the time. That’s your whole day, except for just 20 seconds, three times a day.

Why 20 seconds? Because in just 20 seconds, you can…

… pick up the phone to call that “Big Kahuna” prospect.

… introduce yourself to your dream client at a networking meeting.

… walk up to a circle of strangers and say “Hi.”

… volunteer to come up on stage.

… ask him or her out on a date.

… begin your pitch presentation.

… take a plunge into icy cold water.

… start a tough conversation with a loved one or employee.

… say “no” even though it will make you unpopular.

… even jump out of a plane!

So. What should we do when we hit the inevitable wall of fear?

Do this: Shut off your brain. Close your eyes, hold your breath (if you need to), and do what every signal of your brain is insisting you don’t do—RUN RIGHT AT IT!

Think about it. In order to jump out of a plane flying thousands of feet in the air and free fall to the Earth, you have to shut your brain off. The brain’s only job is survival. There is no way you can intellectually convince the brain that jumping out of a plane is a good idea. It will never allow you to do it. Ever. You have to turn it off for the few seconds you need to hurl your body out the door.

Those 20 seconds of courage are enough time to get engaged in the activity and for your brain to realize it won’t get eaten. From there on, it’s all easy breezy.

The activities you are most afraid of are the activities that can cause a breakthrough in your success. Think of everything you could accomplish if you forced 20 seconds of bravery on your primitive mind just three times a day? Imagine how doing so would multiply your success, lifestyle, and prominence in the marketplace. Think of the breakthroughs you could create.

And! You could still be a coward 99.9305556 percent of the time—just a really rich and successful one!

“The activities you are most afraid of are the activities that can cause a breakthrough in your success. Step into them.” @DarrenHardy JoinTheRide

1. FOCUS ON TASKS, NOT OUTCOMES

Your brain is a drama queen. It makes mountains out of molehills. It sees a flea and magnifies it into a Tyrannosaurus rex. I call this the twisted mind effect.

A friend of mine recently visited the mall with his wife and fourteen-year-old daughter, Ashley. After some individual shopping, he met with his wife at their agreed-upon meeting spot.

When he asked his wife where Ashley was, she said she thought their daughter was with him, as she had been when they originally parted ways. “She was with me just a few minutes ago,” he said, “but she said she was going ahead to meet you. She should be with you.” “I haven’t seen her,” his wife responded.

They both looked at each other, worried.

After a long two minutes of waiting and scanning every person who walked by, panic set in. The father took off running, retracing every step they had taken in the last hour. The mother asked shoppers she saw if they had seen a girl of her daughter’s description. As they both looked frantically for their daughter, visions of abduction and child predators flooded their minds. Within ten minutes, they had three store security guards and a team of four mall cops huddled to begin a full-scale Ashley-hunt. Mom was crying. Dad was yelling.

Moments later, Ashley bounded up cheerfully to the group with a brace-filled smile, asking, “Hey, what’s going on?” Her mom burst out a yelp, ran up to her, and nearly squeezed the life out of her. Her father, shaky on the brink of tears himself, joined the family hug. “Where were you?” he asked.

“I was trying on a pair of pants in the store right there,” Ashley said, pointing to a shop fifty feet away.

In a span of twelve minutes, the minds of the mother and father magnified the reality of their daughter being just a few minutes tardy, into projections of her being abducted, molested, and murdered.

That’s the twisted mind effect.

And it happens all the time… and to the best of us.

The solution isn’t to ignore important things but instead to focus on the task at hand without magnification. It’s not only a better way to get through life, but it’s the secret of the great pressurized-playmakers.

When Michael Jordan is about to get the ball to take the winning shot, he isn’t thinking about the outcome and how this shot will define the season, the championship, the Sports Center highlight, his career, and legacy. He’s only thinking about the shot—one he has taken a million times.

When Tiger Woods is standing over the final putt on the eighteenth green of the Masters on Sunday, he isn’t thinking how this one stroke could be the $500,000 difference between victory and second place. He’s not thinking of his Majors win competition with Jack Nicklaus, and he’s not thinking about the several-million-dollar spike this one putt will generate in his endorsement deals. He is only thinking about the task. That one putt. A stroke he has made a million times.

The same rules apply to you in the moments when anxiety closes in. You, too, can become a pressurized-playmaker. Just focus on the task—picking up the phone, holding your hand out and saying “Hi,” looking in the eye of your client and saying, “sign here.” Don’t let your mind twist itself into a frantic mess by focusing on the magnified (and usually negative and false) outcome.

1. HABITUATE YOURSELF TO FEAR

One organization that understands better than any other how to beat our innate fear response is the military. If the average person is scared to make a speech, imagine what the average undisciplined and slovenly teenager’s response to being shot at and attacked by insurgents might be. The military takes these young newbies who’ve never been far from the bosoms of their mothers, and through the boot camp process, they turn them into fearless warriors.

As part of the transformation, new recruits are subjected to relentless and repeated fear, pressure, and stress. The result? Would-be soldiers are habituated to fear. Now, when they’re 8,000 miles away from home in Afghanistan and the bullets start flying, they don’t run in the opposite direction.

It takes a well-hacked brain to face enemy fire and run toward it. But if you can train your brain to run at bullets and bombs, think how easy it can be to train it to run toward a stage, a prospecting call, or a group of strangers.

This process started for me as kid under the habituation coaching of my “Gunnery Sergeant” father. During my first game of Little League, I kept jumping out of the batter’s box when the pitcher threw the ball. In my defense, it’s a normal brain response when a flying orb is coming at your head. But it’s not good for hitting a baseball.

Plus, in my dad’s opinion, I looked like a sissy.

My dad definitely was not going to father any sissy, so the next Saturday he took me to the baseball diamond for some batting practice. This was no Disneyland—I was not excited about this father-son excursion.

“All right,” he said, “stand in that box. Your feet never leave that box. I don’t care where this ball is—your feet never leave the box. You hear me?” I heard him—but just barely over the sound of my knees knocking.

He started with a whiffle ball, and threw it right at me. I flinched, and it hit me, but the light plastic ball didn’t hurt. He kept throwing it at me over and over. The more he threw it, the less I flinched or moved. Then he started throwing it over the plate so I could swing at it. Every once in a while he threw it right at me on purpose, but I was frozen in that box like a statue.

Next, he took out a tennis ball and repeated the process. The tennis ball hurt a little more—just enough to matter. But I got used to seeing the ball come at me over and over until I didn’t flinch.

“All right,” he said, “now we’re gonna use a baseball.”

Seeing my face, he added, “Look, I’m not going to try to hit you, but if I do, no big deal, okay?” I was skeptical.

“I’ll tell you what,” he continued. “If I hit you three times, we’ll go to pizza when were done.” Now, I really liked pizza back then, so I agreed.

Near the end of the long batting practice, he had only hit me once, and I found myself actually leaning in to the next pitch hoping to shorten the time-gap between me and a piece of pepperoni sausage. “Ha! There’s two!” I shouted from the batter’s box. “One more and we go to pizza!” We practiced many times after that, and I always found a way to get hit three times. In fact, I got so used to getting hit with the ball that it became my greatest strength in baseball. I would crowd the plate, just asking to be hit. It drove pitchers crazy. I got on base by being hit more than most great hitters do by getting hits. But I got on base, baby!

My greatest weakness became my strength because I habituated myself to it. As a result, I no longer feared it. You can do the same with your fears. Do the thing you fear over and over again, until you train your brain that it’s no longer something to be feared. Not only will the fear lose all power over you, but that fear can become the very thing that separates your success from everyone else’s mediocrity.

1. MAKING FEAR AND FAILURE FUN

I got into real estate when I was only 20 years old. At that point, I had no experience and no knowledge of the business at all. I was starting from scratch and a complete novice.

At my first real estate seminar, I asked the lecturer to lunch and grilled him for his best tip on being successful in the industry.

“My best tip? Sure. Go fail. A lot.” He said.

“What?!” I said. “I thought the whole idea of success was to avoid failure.” “The key to success is massive failure. Your goal is to out-fail your competition.” @DarrenHardy JoinTheRide

“Quite the opposite,” he said. “The key to success is massive failure. Your goal is to out-fail your competition. In most businesses, whoever can fail the most, the fastest, and the biggest wins.” I was still perplexed. As far as I was concerned, failure was something you tried to do as little of as possible.

To clarify, he picked up a cocktail napkin, and pulled out a pen. “Life, growth, and achievement,” he said, “work like a pendulum.” He drew a simple diagram on the napkin. “On one side, you have failure, rejection, defeat, pain, and sadness. On the other side, you have success, acceptance, victory, joy, and happiness. If you stand still in life, you won’t experience much failure and pain. But you won’t find much success and happiness either.

“Over time,” he continued, “most people figure out how to operate in a narrow comfort zone. They can only allow the pendulum to swing a small distance into pain, rejection, and failure, thus they only experience the same small degree of joy, connection, and success on the other side of the swing.” The key is you cannot experience one side without an equal proportion of the other. This is the mistake most people make: They think they can have success without failure, love without heartache, and happiness without sadness. As sure as we have gravity, we have the pendulum swing of success and failure.

He added, “Now you really can’t control the side of success. Often what you pursue eludes you. But the one side of the pendulum you can control is the side of failure and rejection. That is why it is your job to go swing that pendulum as high and big as you can. Go fail. Big. Fast.” I had nothing to lose, so I just took his advice at face value. I really went for it. I became a failure-seeking maniac. I strategized on how I could get as much failure, as big and as fast as possible. Fortunately, in real estate sales, there are several ways.

One is calling on expired listings. As I mentioned earlier, these are people who had their house on the market with another agent and it didn’t sell. The minute the listing shows up as “expired” on the computer, 50-plus agents call immediately. Sellers, unsurprisingly, quickly become mad and confrontational. Oh goody, lots of rejection, pain, and sadness there!

Then there were the FSBOs—“For Sale By Owners.” These are people who hate Realtors so much they wouldn’t even think of listing with one. There is plenty of pain, sadness, defeat, rejection, and failure to be had there, too.

When I was finished with all of them (and done wiping the tears from my eyes!), I would park my car at the end of a street and get out. I carried a little note pad with 50 checkboxes on it, and I wouldn’t allow myself to get back in the car until all 50 boxes were checked. Then I’d go knock on doors. This strategy elicited plenty of angry jeers, barking and biting dogs, slammed doors, and kids throwing rocks from across the street. Tons-o-fun!

Then for a final serving of pain pie, I’d go to my office. The hours between 5:00 and 9:00 p.m. were “money time.” For four hours straight, I would cold call on the phone. Why that time period? Because that’s when people are home and usually having dinner. People love it when you call during dinner! Lots of pain, rejection, and sadness to be had there.

But guess what?

First of all, failure got a lot easier. Rejection no longer stung. I started making a game out of it. It actually became kind of comical.

Then something else happened: The pendulum started to swing back.

Some of those expired listings listed with me.

Some of those FSBOs ended up converting and listing with me.

And some of those cold doors and cold-calls actually were looking to sell and listed with me.

That is how I ended up outselling an office of 44 veteran agents, combined… and dominating the city the next year and the entire county of 3,000 agents the following year. I was willing to be a massive failure, and I ended up loving it. In fact, it became quite addictive because I knew it was the controlling factor in my greater success.

If you want to start your pendulum swinging in wider arcs, you’ll need to start experiencing more failure. Think of it this way: Level One growth is recognizing that rejection and failure are not bad. You start walking out of the shadows of your fears.

Level Two is accepting failure as part of the process along your journey. That’s where many good salespeople and entrepreneurs are. They don’t like it, but they accept it as part of the process.

“The most successful person in the room is also the one who has failed the most. Go fail!” @DarrenHardy JoinTheRide

But to be great? When you become truly unstoppable and rise way above everyone else? That’s when you reach Level Three. When you don’t just see failure as good or just accept it as part of the process, but when you really love it, seek it, celebrate it, and become addicted to pushing yourself to gain more of it. That is when all resistance is removed, and the pendulum has nothing left to do but make gargantuan swings on the side of success, wealth, and happiness.

To this day, if I get to the end of the week or month and I have not failed significantly at something, I am mad at myself. Why? Because I want more success. How do I get it? More failure.

Remember: The key to success is massive failure.

Go fail!

TERRIFYINGLY THRILLING!

Do you remember your first roller coaster? Not the entrepreneurial kind, but your first honest-to-goodness rail-gripping, knuckle-whitening amusement park ride?

As a kid, the real badge of honor on a roller coaster wasn’t to just ride the ride—any chump could do that—but to be able to put your hands in the air. To not, in other words, hang on.

“Risk means acting without certainty. It’s scary. But it’s also what makes the entrepreneur roller coaster so thrilling!” @DarrenHardy JoinTheRide

The first time, letting go was a real gut-wrencher. Without the feel of the cold bar in your palms, you had no choice but to rely on the seat belt or safety bar to hold you in. And there were moments where you could feel yourself lift right out of the seat.… But, if you could summon the nerve to do it, to let go, a couple of interesting things happened.

First, you learned to trust. If you didn’t hang on, you had to believe that the safety systems on the ride worked. That the seat belt would keep you in. That the shoulder harness would hold you down. You had to believe, in other words, that the systems would support you.

Second, you found the value of facing your fear. You discovered that when you put your hands in the air, you enjoyed the ride more. It was more thrilling. When you took the risk, you got more in return. Putting your hands in the air on the ride was a way of turning fear into something positive. It made the ride better.

In the real world, in your real business, risk works the same way. You risk more, you get more. You face your fears, and you profit as a result.

Are you ready to ride with your hands in the air? To face your fear?

Risk is, by definition, doing something without certainty. It’s riding in the dark. It’s more terrifying, certainly. But that’s what makes it so thrilling, so rewarding, and so freaking awesome!

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