Chapter 13

Dumbo Feathers

When preparing to face uncertainty, it’s important to surround ourselves with helpful people who believe we are up to the task. The premise of the entire field of social psychology is that outcomes are affected as much by our surroundings as by our free will. When we have encouragement from our friends and family, our confidence grows. Thus, who and what we spend time with become either Dumbo feathers—recall the cartoon elephant Dumbo, who gained the confidence to fly by holding on to a “magic feather” (really just an ordinary feather)—or quest destroyers that hold us back from achieving our dreams.

Like many of us, Kate Bezar wondered if she was on the right career track. After working in management consulting for years, she took a two-year sabbatical, taking classes and trying new things, only to discover that she didn’t want to do any of the things she explored. Having “burned through [her] savings like nothing else,” she approached a newsstand one night wanting to “read about people who were doing great stuff, who had found their passion in life, who were living their fullest potential.”1 All she found were “pretty pictures of dresses, and clothes, and houses and cars.” That night she had an epiphany. Her journal entry captures her euphoria: “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to make a magazine with soul and passion and heart, and it’s going to be about living a rich life and not about material possessions but about experience and fulfilment and all of those magic things.” She named the magazine Dumbo Feather, a nod to “magic” things that can inspire us to believe we are capable of greatness.

There are many kinds of Dumbo feathers that you can rely on to give you confidence to do new things. In fact, the definition of “noun” comes to mind: people, places, and things all have the power to inspire us to reach our highest potential. People encourage, believe in, and support you like no other Dumbo feather can; places can be powerful instigators and reminders of change and authenticity; cherished objects can give you a boost, helping you feel grounded, prepared, and loved. Our job is to find and hold on to Dumbo feathers, letting them work their magic in our lives, because their opposite, quest destroyers, are an unfortunate reality we must guard against.

We were reminded of this reality in the Chyulu Hills of Kenya, where we spent time with the Maasai guide Kuroyi, who gave our family a pep talk about achieving dreams. Using the analogy of becoming a pilot, he advised, “If you want to be a pilot, you need to dress like a pilot, act like a pilot, and spend time around pilots.”2 Then he added with emphasis, “You have to convince yourself most of all!” As we walked behind him, deliberating whether wearing the pilot outfit could really make a difference, he said, “Don’t spend time with people who don’t believe in you.” Standing tall in his bright-red tunic under the setting December sun, he pantomimed what happens if you do. With two hands raised as if holding imaginary reins, he moved his wrists in three distinct stepping-down movements in sync with his warning. “Otherwise, they will bring you down, bring you down, bring you down.” By the end his hands were at an unnaturally low position, below his knees. We stood there transfixed. We knew it was true. Let Kuroyi’s hand gestures become a reminder that people, places, and things can raise you up or bring you down.

Identifying quest destroyers is sometimes easy, but sometimes they might be hiding behind a guise of trying to help. How can you know if someone is genuinely trying to help or is acting as a quest destroyer?

Sarah Mouchot and Nico Alary are the cofounders of two well-loved restaurants in Paris. On weekends you can expect to wait up to two hours to taste their delicious food. But to get to that point, they had to learn the difference between Dumbo feathers and quest destroyers.

Mouchot and Alary spent several years outside their native France, working in restaurants and cafés around the world, but in Melbourne they fell in love with the spirit of delicious, unpretentious food served in a friendly atmosphere. On their days off, they took long walks on the beach, dreaming of starting such a restaurant together in Paris. But when they returned home to France, they met stiff resistance. Banks wouldn’t lend them money because they didn’t have collateral or formal credentials from a cooking school. Family members questioned them, filling their minds with all the things that could go wrong. Mouchot remembers, “Everyone attacked it. The menu was too small. We didn’t go to school to be chefs. We had stars in our eyes.”3 Alary synthesized the dilemma: “We love and respect our parents, but should we listen to them?” And what about the banks? What about the people who said they needed expensive training at cooking schools like Le Cordon Bleu or Ferrandi?

The banks, they realized, were risk-averse institutions with a narrow set of criteria that made them myopic to this kind of possibility, and so the rejection did not reflect on the quality of their idea. Many of the acquaintances who questioned their formal credentials were reflecting their own fears about doing new things, as well as the larger French cultural focus on credentials. Even the advice of their parents needed to be taken in context. “Our parents were just trying to protect us because they love us,” Mouchot reflected. “They were coming from the perspective of people who had worked as employees, not entrepreneurs.” There is compassion and wisdom in their observations—they had to sift through the motives of the people giving advice so that they could defend themselves against the quest destroyers, even if those people were well intentioned.

Though discouraged by the naysayers, Mouchot and Alary were willing to take the risk. “We knew it was possible. We wrote our idea down, and whenever we felt discouraged, we went back to that,” Alary remembers. Their manifesto wasn’t poetic or lengthy, just three sentences about what they believed Holybelly (the name of their two restaurants) could be. When negativity was fierce, they went back to that statement, relying on their friendship and belief in each other as the Dumbo feathers to keep them going.

Dumbo feathers don’t eliminate the risk or the hard work. Opening the restaurants required their entire savings and workdays that started at 6 a.m. and ended around 11 p.m. Alary laughs remembering how “we would come home from a workday so exhausted that we would just eat a handful of peanuts and go to bed.” But Dumbo feathers help you believe in yourself. Today, Mouchot and Alary are successful entrepreneurs, but they still hold on to a Dumbo feather, a motto printed on all their menus, mugs, and T-shirts: “It’s good because we care.” That simple idea has guided them through tough times, including endless citywide strikes and three Covid-19 closings. Everything they do has a touch of magic about it because of this one guiding principle.

When the French government closed all restaurants in the first Covid-19 confinement, the Holybelly restaurants had two days to deal with two weeks of food that would spoil. They gave away twenty thousand euros’ worth of prepped food to neighbors and customers. The generosity, the goodwill, and the feeling of warmth they created in that gesture is indescribable. But their generosity didn’t stop there—after an exhausting day of handing out this food, they went home and created Instagram stories with detailed instructions explaining how to cook each item, including techniques, temperatures, and cooking times. When they were finally allowed to reopen for takeout, their fans in Paris quickly overwhelmed them with orders and their admirers from abroad cheered them on.4

Ideas, memories, and stories may be some of the most powerful Dumbo feathers we have. As we recounted in the discussion about regret minimization in chapter 7, when we had the chance to leave a steady and comfortable life in the United States for a job in France, we took courage in the feather Nathan’s grandmother offered him when she advised, “Parents teach their children to live their dreams by living their own dreams.” We held on to that through the fears of moving and the challenges of settling in. Whether your feathers are people, places, or things, don’t forget the ultimate truth: you already have the ability to fly, you just need a little encouragement.