Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2011, shortly after the release of The Social Network (2010). It describes Facebook as the biggest social network in history, as it was then.
Yes, the title of this article is correct. Until now, it was thought that only fearless, brave and decisive people could succeed in business and that fearful or cowardly people rarely achieved anything in life. Well, after analysing the world’s leading businesspeople, experts have found that fear is a key factor in business success. As examples of fearful, insecure people, they point to Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook).
The brave fight only one war; cowards tend to live through several. I don’t remember who said this, but they were right. Fear makes us analyse our surroundings more carefully and, above all, keeps us from being as overconfident as someone who knows no fear.
A fearful person takes fewer steps forward, but those steps tend to be better judged because they take them more cautiously.
As the story goes, Bill Gates couldn’t find the courage to ask a girl out, and at the end-of-year party he finally made up his mind. She turned him down, but Bill Gates learned that you at least have to try. Shy and insecure: that’s how the creator of Microsoft is described. He isn’t even remembered as a great inventor, since many still believe he stole the idea from Steve Jobs, who is the real creator of what we now know as Windows.
Of course, Bill Gates knew how to make a few changes, and he certainly proved to be a great negotiator, pulling off the biggest deal of his life by selling a product he didn’t even have. Experts say that because of his shyness and insecurity he has made very few decisions in his life, but the few he has made have been spot on.
See also: 6 things the middle class doesn’t quite understand about the rich
His deep insecurity made him distrust the people around him, which meant he always kept his strategies secret and could then surprise everyone in his negotiations.
Then we have Mark Zuckerberg, another example of a shy, fearful and insecure person, who has been labelled antisocial, although that hasn’t stopped him from creating the biggest social network in history. There’s little we can say about Zuckerberg that hasn’t already been said, especially since his life was brought to the big screen. People who knew him may disagree somewhat about whether he really stole the idea as well, but they do say his personality was very similar to the one portrayed in the film The Social Network.
Another piece of evidence offered for this claim involves Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google). As we all know, Google’s algorithm and the search engine’s success were mainly the work of Larry Page.
Well, hundreds of students who had never seen photos of Google’s founders were asked about them. In the photos, one looks shyer (Larry Page) and the other… let’s say sharper and more outgoing (Sergey Brin). In 95% of cases, the students thought Larry Page was Sergey Brin.
Wrong. Google’s algorithm was designed by the shyer one, not by the… “smart alec”.
So if you consider yourself shy, insecure or fearful… don’t be afraid to start a business, because business success can be yours too. Your decisions can be much better thought through and therefore more accurate, safer and more likely to set off your success.
Further reading
- How to be a successful businessperson
- If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived
- The secret of success: knowing that success depends on you
- Steve Jobs’s beginnings: a motivational story
Featured image: DFID – UK Department for International Development, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
