Good Life Project - The Curse of Success and How to Avoid It

Episode Date: September 10, 2014

The odd thing about success. It often breeds failure.An interesting thing happens when you start with nothing, work like crazy, take big creative risks that pay off and then end up on top of the world. You discover that the fall from the top of the world hurts a whole lot more than the fall from the street-corner. And you don't want to take that fall.You had nothing to lose in the beginning, but now you do. So, you stop doing the very thing that got you where you are. You operate from a place of loss-avoidance and negative-creativity.This is what we're talking about on today's GLP Jam Session. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Good Life Project, where we take you behind the scenes for in-depth, candid conversations with artists, entrepreneurs, makers, and world shakers. Here's your host, Jonathan Fields. So a few years back, I was giving a keynote, and it was before a room full of entrepreneurs. And from the audience, a voice yells, why are you telling this to us? We're not the people who need to hear this. This is a waste of time. Pin drop in the room. Beyond the fact that a good percentage of the eyeballs in the rows in front

were rolling, it was my first official keynote heckle. And I was talking about mindset and entrepreneurship, more specifically how we need to embrace uncertainty and recognize that creeping emergence of decision-making based not on optimism and possibility, but on fear and the desire to prevent loss. And my friend in the audience was bothered because in that room, a room full of successful entrepreneurs, this wasn't an issue. They all got where they wanted to be by taking these risks. They were the ones without fear, the idea marauders, innovators, and envelope pushers. And indeed, when they started, nearly every person was there. But what about now? What about a few years into their ventures? One of the biggest misses in the entrepreneurial process

and mindset is the assumption that mindset and willingness to embrace risk and creativity are fixed traits. In fact, the more successful most people become, the more they abandon the very mindset that fueled their success. I call this the creator's recall. And here's how it works. So when you're just starting out, especially if you're earlier in life, you don't have a ton of significant responsibilities. It's a lot easier to be hyper creative, to be innovative, to put everything you have on the line and take risks. Because you have a very small amount to lose.

At least very little that isn't fairly easily recoverable. So when you start a business or adopt a do or die attitude, all in mindset, you come up with ideas that are crazy ideas and they are creating a breakout business and you're willing to act on them because beyond ego, even if you fail, the fall really won't cause all that much pain. But then something happens. You succeed. And you begin to build a real venture. You have offices, assets, overhead, inventory, employees, people relying on you. Families are counting on you to pay their rent and send their kids to school. Your own family begins to expect a certain lifestyle. And so do you. You get comfortable. And along with your success, you now have the

perception of so much more to lose if you fail. So instead of taking those same creative risks, your mindset begins to shift into what the famed psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize for behavioral psychology, Daniel Kahneman, calls loss aversion mode. So rather than being driven by what you can build or create and have, you're overwhelmed by a fear of losing what you've already amassed. Being an entrepreneur and an innovator or an artist or creator does not make you immune to the often irrational pull of loss aversion because as Kahneman research shows so clearly, it's human nature. Two problems with this when it comes to creators, artists, makers, entrepreneurs. One, the switch from seeking gain to loss avoidance cultivates a very strong negative

creativity bias that makes us say no to innovative ideas. Ones that come our way from our own minds as well as from those around us and ones that embrace could have been key drivers of innovation and growth. And two, because we set the tone as entrepreneurs, when we pull back, when we stop innovating ourselves and rebuff innovation and creativity from employees, we create an idea killer emotional virus that destroys the very culture that got us where we are. It breeds loss, aversion, fear, scarcity, which is death to innovation and growth and expansion. So what do we do about it? Well, if you're an entrepreneur or you work with an entrepreneur or you're just entrepreneurial

minded within a team and an organization, a key practice is to create a monthly mindset circuit breaker check-in. Take a step back, preferably leave the office or take a few creators with you. Maybe get out into nature and ask a big question. Am I operating from a place of creative opportunity or loss aversion? Be honest and task your team with a no-repercussion opportunity to call you out on a shift to a prevent offense when they see it. Because very often the person least well equipped to notice the shift is you. Most important, never assume that the mindset that got you here is the same as the mindset that guides your efforts today. It may be.

But for many, once you're sitting atop a mountain of success, possibility long ago morphed into fear. And when you see that, own it. Then do something about it.