Chapter 3

Emotional Mechanics

What Only Neuroscientists, Your Friends in the SEALs, and the Israeli Army Will Tell You

Fear. Now fear’s interesting, it keeps you in your hole. You spend all your time avoiding it. But you never can. So you start a relationship. You let it sit on the seat next to you. You tell it to stay put so you can do your job. Until one day you realize: You’re no good without it. It gives you your power, your edge, your game. The fear you thought was stopping you is making you UnStoppable. And that’s the most powerful thing of all.

—U.S. Navy SEAL

TO AN ENTREPRENEUR, DOING IS A TERM OF ART. It means starting, not quitting, and ultimately achieving some value that wasn’t there before. Doing is the most valuable quantity there is. So why don’t we?

One hundred people were asked at random over the course of this project whether they thought owning their own business, being their own boss, launching a new enterprise, and creating jobs for others was a desirable goal. Most said yes.

But when they were asked, “So why do you think most people with the idea or the dream don’t start their own businesses?,” 100 out of 100 answered with a one-word sentence that starts with an F. They all said, “Fear.”1

“They know what they’re talking about,” said Dr. David Ouahnouna, an Israeli human performance scientist. “When a person has something important that they wish to do, they want to do, or need to do—and they are not doing it—then some type of fear is stopping them. Whether they admit or even realize it, a small but insistent voice is saying to them, ‘I can’t, I’m not strong enough, I don’t have the power, I can see what’s going to happen, I don’t believe I can, and I don’t like how this feels.’ Underneath their anxiety, the person is feeling elements of more specific phobias or primary instincts like fear of the unknown, fear of loss, fear of social isolation or public humiliation, all of which trace back to the mother of all fears, fear of death.”

But since the average person is not a neuroscientist, that single word fear covers it all—and it accounts for the resulting lost possibilities, inaction, noncommitment, nonexploration, and nonstarting for millions of people.

Yet as you’ll see, fear has both a major upside and a big emotional counterpart that can tame it. Turning these emotions to your advantage is the whole purpose of the discipline we call emotional mechanics.

As an entrepreneur, knowing the business mechanics—the technical, operational, and financial mechanics—gets you on the field.

But you win with the emotional mechanics.

Understanding and mastering the emotional mechanics makes you UnStoppable.

WHAT IS EMOTIONAL MECHANICS?

The ultimate motivational force in any activity is not physical, intellectual, or technical—it is an emotional force. It’s driven by just two four-letter words: fear—nature’s great stopper, distorter, and diminisher—and another word. I was told this word repeatedly by the toughest, bravest, most UnStoppable achievers this planet has ever known: Navy SEALs, members of elite Israeli commando units, and the people who train them. And it’s backed up by the experience of building a company with a multibillion-dollar market cap from scratch with a culture that is still entrepreneurial 12 years later after growing to more than 5,000 employees worldwide.

That other word that drives the emotional force is love. Love—as in love of teammates, love of company, love of mission, love of commanders and soldiers, love of being needed by people you admire and care about. That kind of love. You can search high and low but there is no substitute for this word, even though traditionally it’s not been a word deemed appropriate for business. Yet the proof is all around us. In the sacrifices that teammates on a mission, soldiers, parents, and even strangers make for others at the risk of pain and mortal injury, the evidence says that love is stronger than death. So, like elite special forces instructors, we’re going to use the word, too.

When both fear and love are harnessed and brought together in you, your team, and your organization, the force that results is belief—a force that trumps any idea, business plan, or graduate degree. No one escapes the influence of fear, love, and belief. When you understand how they’re applied, you gain an extraordinary advantage for your enterprise—one that’s impossible to over-value in today’s hyper-competitive world.

Emotional mechanics—the ability to bring together fear and love to create belief—enables us to start, do, and succeed regardless of odds or resources.

A SEAL or an Israeli Special Forces member will tell you that when it’s all on the line, how you handle emotional mechanics is the difference between mission won or lost, life and death. As an entrepreneur, there will be times when you’ll be putting it all on the line, too. The stakes will be high. That’s what makes emotional mechanics so important.

EXAMPLES ALL AROUND US

Star athletes tell us all the time that, at the top level, every player has the technical ability. Everyone on the tour has the ground strokes, has played thousands of games, and is in peak condition.

But the language we use to describe the difference between winners and losers on a given day is almost never about the physical. Rather, we talk about an emotional state of mind: “She just wanted it more.” “He didn’t get rattled.” “She dug deeper than the pain.” “They just know how to win.” “They kept their concentration.” “They have no quit.” “They play as one.” “She can ski right on the edge but never go over.”

Herein lies that last 1 to 3 percent, a great player’s winning margin.

Ask the world’s highest-paid athlete, Tiger Woods. He was hailed as the second coming within months of going pro, became the world’s number one golfer and stayed number one for the next 11 years. Tiger wasn’t just UnStoppable, he was invincible, and the world wanted to go along for the ride.

And then, as most people know, it was suddenly over. The sex scandal. The canceled sponsors. The public ridicule. Tiger apologized on TV, quit the tour, and entered celebrity rehab.

Finally, after several months in exile, he decided to come back. There wasn’t anything physically different about Tiger. The perfect mechanics of his swing and 25 years of muscle memory hadn’t changed. He stepped back onto the course as always . . . but for the first time in his life, Tiger Woods couldn’t win.

What had changed, and what he had lost, was his emotional mechanics. Tiger’s legendary grip on his own confidence, pride, and concentration was being challenged by doubt, distraction, and the pressure not to fail—fear, in other words. He dropped to 58th in the rankings. He looked finished.

The epilogue, after three years of battling and throwing his clubs in the pond like the rest of us, is that Tiger has finally won another big tournament and appears to be getting back on track. If he stays there, it will be because he regained his mastery of those emotional mechanics.

UNDERSTANDING FEAR

Emotional mechanics gives you your Power Set, the third leg of the stool in Accelerated Proficiency. To master it, you need to know a little bit about fear. Here’s why.

For our own survival, over the past million years Mother Nature has given us love and fear. Love is positive and proactive: love of belonging, love of country, love of ideas, love of success. But love is complex and needs time to develop and grow.

Fear does not. Fear is quick and fear is dumb. Fear is primitive and reactive, easier to wire into ancient living things in the beginning, when the number one item on their daily to-do list was to avoid being eaten. So Nature made fear the default: deep, automatic, and redundant. Fear and its unwelcome relatives (risk, obstacles, and failure) form an immediate barrier that, as neuroscientist Gregory Berns explains in his book Iconoclast, can literally change our perception, block our imagination, and make millions of us stop before we even start or make us quit too soon. Fear is the great limiter.2

But fear also has a huge human upside. Fear contains tremendous, tireless energy. Fear turned around is a major motivating force that humans have used to push themselves forward since time began. So fear is also the source of great power—but it only works if we don’t let our fear response stop us before we start. If we learn to accept and direct it, fear provides the electricity to sharpen our edge, juice our senses, and stiffen our persistence. That means fear is also a gift and opportunity.

That’s a good thing, since fear is absolutely universal.

Eric Greitens, a champion boxer, Oxford Rhodes Scholar, and officer in the Navy SEALs, wrote about the reality he found at SEAL basic training (known as BUD/S) in his book, The Heart and the Fist: “These were athletes: high school and college football players, water polo players, state champion wrestlers. Many of them could ace the runs, but as we’d learn over and over again in BUD/S, physical fitness mattered little without the mental fortitude to deal with fear.”3

You may not think of yourself as a fearful person. You may not think that the great risk-taking entrepreneurs and warriors ever bask in fear. But here’s why the PhDs in fear would beg to differ.

Fear is the original animal emotion—and every one of us is an active carrier. No one escapes its influence on our lives, relationships, choices, and decisions. Any successful entrepreneur who tells you he hasn’t been scared or even terrified at some point in the life of his business is either lying or in a state of denial. Every seasoned warrior, every experienced actor about to take the stage, and every great athlete who ever set foot in the arena knows it, too.

So we can’t take fear out of the equation. But we can learn to outwit the beast, to repurpose it and reap the benefits of doing so. Understanding a little about the brain’s fear system can show us tactics for taming it.

FEAR AND THE BRAIN

As every animal knows, fear feels bad:4 physically because of the jolt of the stress response, and mentally because of a control center in our brains that governs fear, anger, and our memories around fear. It’s the notorious, walnut-sized amygdala.

The fear response causes a whole-body stress condition that prepares us instantly for flight or fight. It dilates our pupils, raises our blood pressure, narrows our field of vision, sharpens all five senses, dries out our mouths, and covers us with sweat. The response is so automatic, these changes start before our conscious minds even pick up the scent.

Fear needs to feel bad so it can get our attention in time and make us want to avoid any situation that triggers it. That’s good for the amygdala, which is programmed like the Terminator—to shoot first and ask questions later. The amygdala’s job is to detect fear, rate it, remember it, and make us dodge or extinguish it . . . and like the Terminator, it is very, very good at what it does.

For the first million years of human existence, the amygdala was probably right 99 percent of the time. But today that hard-wired programming poses a big problem, because now we know something else: fear also accompanies opportunity, adventure, ground-breaking innovation, and our most worthwhile dreams of accomplishment—all key aspects of entrepreneurship. The primitive, irrational, and remorseless amygdala would stop us in our tracks if it could.

FEAR’S ACHILLES’ HEEL

Luckily for you—and our economic future—the amygdala’s rigid, irrational qualities are also its undoing. We can use a far more evolved, intelligent part of the brain to literally outsmart and tame the amygdala like the clumsy, primeval slug that it is. In fact, every time we step forward to take a worthwhile risk to achieve something, that’s exactly what we are doing.

We are rescued from our ancient response by a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. And the best news of all is that we can actively condition the cortex and become quite skilled at throwing the amygdala off track. The cortex does this by reframing—that is, redefining and redirecting—those fear impulses. It works especially well on the three main intangible or achievement fears that, more than any others, stop us from reaching for higher accomplishments:5

Neuroscientists seem to agree that these are the holy trinity, the three big fears that conspire to stop us from leaving the safety of the corral and daring to deal with risk.

Programming the cortex to counter them is one of the keys to mastering emotional mechanics. We can learn to change our relationship with our fears by understanding them, seeing them, touching them, and feeling the power we unleash in ourselves each time with overcome them. And changing our relationship with our fears changes how we manage fear’s three unwelcome cousins—risk, failure, and obstacles.

THE POWER OF RISK

When a retired business executive was asked late in life if there was any one thing he regretted, the man replied, “I would have ended up eighty-five anyway. I wish I had taken more risk.”

In simplest terms, risk is the possibility that we might lose, with consequences. Based on what we’ve just discussed about fear, that’s all it takes to drive the amygdala nuts and make it do everything in its power to attach fear to any kind of risk and prevent us from taking it. And since fear feels bad, risk feels bad. The problem is, we can’t achieve any human progress without risk.

As a sage insurance executive I know once said, “We sail our boats every day on a sea of risk. We can’t get to our destination without navigating through it.” The same applies to all of us. Bottom line: risk doesn’t go with the territory, it is the territory—that is, if we plan to build, create, innovate, experience, achieve, or win at anything.

In our new, dynamic world, where change is accelerating all around us, the safety we feel by hiding behind a rock instead of putting ourselves in motion has become an illusion—the riskiest decision of all. As the SEALs like to say, it’s always less risky to do it than to have it done to you. In live combat—the most dynamic situation there is—the deadliest action you can take is to stay in one place over time. So not moving is not an option. In the same way, as entrepreneurs, we have to change just to stay the same, just to hold onto what we’ve got, let alone get ahead, and the trend is going in only one direction. Change means choices, and choices mean risk.

But don’t worry if you’re not a risk lover.

You’ll never have to be. Nearly all entrepreneurs and achievers are the opposite—they’re dream, idea, and mission lovers. They accept that risk (and the fear that comes with it) is a natural condition of going somewhere—and they want to eliminate their chances of not getting there. So they become risk reducers and risk mitigators above all.

How do you minimize risk? Exactly the same way the SEALs and IDF do:

Consider this example: The average skydiver wants to live as long as you do. She hates the way fear feels. But flying through the sky is what she yearns for because to her, it’s life-affirming, almost spiritual. So she minimizes her risk just as the SEALs or any good entrepreneur would do: she eliminates the preventable hazards, she doesn’t pull low (that is, wait too long before opening her chute), she doesn’t fly without an automatic activation device, she doesn’t fly under the influence, and she doesn’t make high-speed landings. She practices her technicals (basic proficiency skills) and flight-checks her equipment. The result? She’s got the odds of an accident down to 1 out of 300,000 on every jump, safer than driving her car to the drop zone. She reminds herself of this fact when her amygdala sends her the fear demons.

Becoming a confident, expert sailor on the sea of risk gives you a winner’s edge no matter what course you take in life.

THE POWER OF FAILURE

“Failure is feedback. And feedback is the breakfast of champions.”

—A fortune cookie

James Dyson invented the world’s first bagless vacuum cleaner, even after every vacuum cleaner maker in the world told him for years that he shouldn’t, they couldn’t, and buyers wouldn’t. It took him five years of tinkering in his cellar, but after 5,000 failed tries (or “prototypes,” as engineers call them), he built a working model and got it to market. Within 18 months, it was the number one–selling vacuum cleaner. Now Dyson is a billionaire.

Dyson says, “I’m particularly adept at making mistakes—it’s a necessity as an engineer. Each iteration of the vacuum came about because of a mistake I needed to fix. What’s important is that I didn’t stop at the first failure, the 50th, or the 5,000th. I never will. Believing that big companies would choose good technology—progress—over short-term profit was a big mistake. I love mistakes.”6

Without exaggeration, it is impossible to succeed without failing your way there. Failure means learning. Failure means adjusting and fixing. Failure means measuring your limits. Failure means peeling away the outside to get to the essence. Failing means eliminating the obstacles that block your progress. Failure means getting better and stronger. For all these reasons, failure is always temporary—unless you quit.

As Thomas Edison said, you must “fail your way to success.” Edison tested countless fibers over three years until he finally found the right material (a kind of carbonized bamboo) to serve as the filament for his incandescent light bulb—which changed the world. When asked about his innumerable failures, Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times, I found 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb.”

No one expects you to enjoy failure, and you certainly don’t want you to aim for failure. We want you to understand it and reframe it so fear of failure won’t keep you from risk. Repositioning failure in our minds is one of the easier tasks in emotional mechanics, because it’s an intellectual proposition. Fear of failure is powered by our instinctual fear of loss and humiliation that we consciously imagine, which prevents us from taking risks. But we can extinguish this fear when we rationally decide that failure is actually something positive—as long as it serves the mission and as long as we pick up and keep going when it happens.

SEALs use failure as a primary training tool. “We fail in little ways a thousand times a day,” one SEAL said. In early training exercises, or evolutions as SEALs call them, the instructors often set goals that they know the students cannot reach to teach them certain functional boundaries. The overall goal is to have them experience the power of coming back—to realize their capacity not to quit until the mission succeeds.

In their book Start-up Nation, Dan Senor and Saul Singer say the Israeli military puts so much stock in extracting learning through failure that they conduct elaborate analysis and debriefing rituals. They rate leaders on their talent and effectiveness at debriefing their subordinates, because they consider it as crucial as any other leadership skill. It’s made clear to everyone that so-called constructive or intelligent failure is acceptable as long as it’s in service of improvement and ultimate mission success.

The Israelis’ deep-rooted cultural attitude toward failure is seen as a key factor in that tiny nation’s remarkable start-up volume, out of proportion to its size. In Israel, if you haven’t tried and failed to start a business two or three times, people wonder what’s the matter with you. You must be a slacker or something!7

No team or organization will be able to compete in the dynamic new world unless they see constructive failure as a critical tool of innovation, not to be wasted. Unless it’s possible to dare and fail and dare again, no organization will risk innovative thinking or get the benefit of its people’s entrepreneurial power. They will be left in the dust by the organizations that do. Failure is a series of stepping stones, a strengthener, a “smartener,” an irremovable part of the doing process. It’s not supposed to be fun or painless—but if you keep at it with doggedness and intelligence, it will train you for success.

THE POWER OF OBSTACLES

Imagine the 100-yard dash at the Olympics. Ten sprinters are lined up with straight lanes in front of them to the finish line. But what if, a minute before the race, the officials put three-foot-tall hurdles on the track and said, “We have some new rules. You all have to jump these hurdles as you race.” The sprinters would have a fit. “It’s impossible, we’re not trained, we’ll get injured, we can’t,” they’d shout, and storm out in protest.

Now, just to keep things going, the officials decide to leave the hurdles up and call out the hurdlers. Ready, set, BANG! They’d be off at the gun and run as gracefully as gazelles over all the hurdles. One or two might set records and earn tickets to Disney World.

For the hurdlers, the challenge of leaping over three-foot-tall obstacles is completely normal. They do thousands of hurdles a week until it becomes a key proficiency. Each new hurdle doesn’t make them happier; if they drop their focus, the hurdle will still drop them. But jumping hurdles doesn’t hold up their progress or sap their confidence. They’ve made handling obstacles a habit.

In much the same way, UnStoppable people accept that entrepreneuring, innovating, or embarking on any great mission is an obstacle course. It’s a path lined with problems needing to be solved. But they accept this as normal. More than that, they know that they’re refining their expert intuition with every hurdle they face. That means they see patterns and solutions that others don’t see, often because their unconscious recognizes something familiar.8 They stay clear headed, continue to believe that a solution exists, and keep trying until they find it. Overcoming obstacles has become a habit.

This insight is crucial for Charley Housen, the unlikely entrepreneur who built the Erving Paper Mills company and who is the actual reason why Wendy’s napkins around the world are yellow. He uses this approach when presented with the glitches and problems of building his business each day. To Housen, a setback that might thwart the average business person is just another normal hurdle.

Housen learned to think this way when his uncle, the head of the family business, suddenly died. Charley was forced to leave law school and take charge of the company. The more problems and snafus he had to solve, the easier it got to grab opportunities and flip the go-switch when they appeared. Charley eventually realized that no opportunity comes free of obstacles, and there are always solutions because he’d seen so many. By doing it so often, he found he had a knack for it.

One day Charley was offered an irresistible deal—the chance to buy a warehouse full of used telephone books in rural Massachusetts for a bargain price. (And yes—four million phone books can be classified as irresistible when you’re in the paper recycling business, like Charley was.) There was just one problem. The four million books were the Yellow Pages, and it would be impossible to spend the money to get all the yellow dye out of the paper and still make a profit. The market for canary yellow recycled paper is rather limited, but Charley’s experience told him he could deal with this obstacle. He bought the books.

It may have been luck or coincidence, but it turned out that Charley Housen had gotten friendly with Dave Thomas of Columbus, Ohio, through a business connection. He knew Dave was an entrepreneur who was starting a hamburger chain, so Charley did the natural entrepreneurial thing—the secret of success for centuries—and picked up the phone to call him. Dave needed a napkin supplier, and Charley convinced him that yellow napkins would make a lovely, distinctive accessory that would become a brand signature the world round. Also, that the yellow dye looked especially great with mustard. Charley’s irresistible deal on the Yellow Pages became another entrepreneur’s irresistible deal on napkins.

What to do with four million Yellow Pages’ worth of scrap paper from which the dye won’t come out? Just another hurdle, just another opportunity.

For a master of emotional mechanics, the formula is simple. Problems are obstacles; obstacles are temporary failures; failure poses risk; and risk inspires fear, which, when we handle it intelligently, empowers us to find solutions. That’s why obstacle is really just another word for opportunity.

THE LOVE ADVANTAGE

Love has a branding problem. (Other than that, it’s perfect.) For mainstream thinkers, love lives in the category generally reserved for chick flicks. It has no place in the analytical world of objectivity that good business demands.

Yet businesses are 100 percent built by, staffed by, and beholden to human beings, and if Madison Avenue can say that “America Runs on Dunkin’,” we can say that human beings run on love. It is the one free substance that everyone wants more of, especially in the place where we spend half of our waking lives: the workplace.

But let’s be clear: love comes in a variety of forms, and emotional mechanics is not advocating romantic love and affection in your place of business. It means love in the forms of belonging, respect, peer bonding, and inspiring missions that you undertake with others.

In businesses and even in the military, when the positive emotional factor of love is allowed to function anywhere near its true capacity, it produces a remarkable cause and effect. It unleashes confidence, innovation, creativity, and emotional investment. It is said that a person will give you his back and his brawn for a paycheck, but he’ll give his heart and his brains for love—and will sacrifice to keep it.

Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld, a world champion team skydiver, told me about this form of power, especially in true teams. Teammates love two things even more than themselves and their own preservation: belonging to a group of teammates whom they admire and respect enough to trust with their lives, and having such a group need and believe in them. They will go to great lengths—suffering pain, misery, and discomfort without quitting, even making the ultimate sacrifice—not to lose the team’s admiration or let it down.

Bottom line: This kind of love adds up to humanity’s number one unlimited, clean alternative energy source—the only force strong enough to tame fear with all its attendant demons when it is properly deployed. Wouldn’t it make the simplest common sense to tap this free force in any type of business—not just entrepreneurial start-ups—to boost energy, loyalty, positive attitude, and competiveness?

Graham Weston will tell you that, of all the factors that enabled Rackspace to grow from 4 employees to 5,000 and to rise above dozens of competitors, love is the most powerful. He’s referring to several kinds of love: love of their shared mission (to deliver Fanatical Support), love of their customers, love of their common values and their crazy traditions, and the love that unites teammates who are striving to accomplish something great together. “We’d all do anything to keep this feeling that we get at work alive,” Graham says. “Succeeding is how we hang on to it.”

THE UNSURPASSED POWER OF BELIEF

There’s one all-purpose tool that’s more valuable than any other one in the box—one that trumps any kind of natural-born talent. And while philosophers and theologians have debated its definition for eons, we won’t. When Henry Ford said simply, “If you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right,” he didn’t mean a spiritual abstraction, he meant that belief is a real, self-fulfilling prophesy. This is the inner voice that “talks us into it,” that thrills us with desire because we see our dream as possible for us to achieve. Thinking “it’s possible” triggers confidence, determination, and energy. Thinking the opposite makes any task impossible.

Belief is a mental and physical, conscious and unconscious condition, the only combined force strong enough to knock down the wall of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD)—the master stopper of the universe.

Being in a state of belief literally manufactures the success factors for us: it creates a clearer vision of our objective, decriminalizes risk, boosts our pain tolerance, motivates us to inspire others, and feeds the fire of hope. Belief gives us the power to persevere beyond where we ever thought we could, and solve what couldn’t be solved.

Without belief, our thoughts act against us ruthlessly, wielding FUD to make the emotional and psychological barrier a wall we can’t climb.

The outcome of mastering emotional mechanics is belief. Ultimately, in an organization of any size, only a Belief Culture can sustain and unleash entrepreneurship, initiative, innovation, and joy. Unfortunately, all too many companies operate instead with Fear Cultures, which inevitably kill the entrepreneurial spirit.

For this reason, Fear Cultures will be unable to compete in the new economic order of the twenty-first century.

1 Actually, we should make it 101 because Henry Ford, one of the greatest entrepreneurs, agreed and wrote famously about fear. Ford believed that fear permeates the decision to go forward in any business. But he thought that once fear was recognized, it could be deconstructed, reappraised, and made into a positive. It seems that Ford was ahead of his time in emotional mechanics, just as he was in the other kind of mechanics.

2 Gregory Berns, Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010).

3 Eric Greitens, The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).

4 Berns, Iconoclast.

5 Tangible, physical fears like fear of injury, sickness, and physical pain can inhibit us in specific instances, too, but the three achievement fears are intangible and have the broadest impact on our main subjects: entrepreneuring and innovation.

6 James Dyson, “My Favorite Mistake,” Newsweek, May 29, 2011, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/05/29/my-favorite-mistake-james-dyson.html.

7 Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (New York: Twelve, 2009).

8 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow.