INBOUND Bold Talks: Dan Pallotta "Scared to Death and Doing it Anyway"

Key Takeaways

[Music] [Applause] how how are you you having a good conference so far yeah good all right well I want to talk about fear and the myth of fearlessness and that debilitating sense of Terror that can come over us when we commit ourselves to something big and Brave and Bold and new you know we're taught here is a sign of weakness there's a quote by Vince Lombardi that kind of sums up the Macho testosterone driven cultural attitude winners never quit and quitters never win the implication is if you want to quit you're a loser and that's not been my experience everyone I know who has done something really Brave and really great has been consumed really with Terror and with self-doubt and with the desire to quit you know you don't see it on the outside but it's there on the inside Georgia o'keef said something that I think is a lot more honest she said I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do when I was in college I organized uh 38 of my classmates to Bicycle Across America with me to fight world hunger and this was the route that we planned to take and we got on a plane in Boston and we took a 6-hour flight to Seattle we unboxed our bikes bikes we assembled them and we started pedaling and about 3 days into this in Washington state I was exhausted and decided that I had had just about enough of this whole thing and I wanted to quit and I got ahead of myself and I started to have this mental panic attack where I was saying to myself all right and and it was raining to make matters worse right so I started to say look I'm exhausted and we're not even at the lunch stop yet I got 20 miles more to go to get to lunch and once I get to lunch that's not the end of the day I still got 30 miles to go to finish the day and when I finish the day that's not the end of the week I got four more days to go to finish the end of the week and that's not the end of the month I got three more weeks to go to finish the end of the month and that's not the end of this stupid ride I got a month and a have to go after that month and I just want to go home but I didn't and we rode our bikes 4,256 miles across the continental United States and it was you know one of the most beautiful experiences I've ever had in my life and uh we got into New York and we were greeted like Heroes Brian Gumble interviewed us on the Today's Show we got to ride around sha stadium before the Mets game and they put us up on the Jumbotron and they played char of fire and everyone was crying you know it was it was really amazing and then years later I began to lose a lot of friends to AIDS and I never forgot the power of that journey and I thought you know the gay community really needs something big like that for people to participate in and so I created this event called California AIDS ride and it was a 7-Day bike ride from San Francisco all the way down the coast of California to Los Angeles Angeles and you had to go the whole seven days you had to go the whole 600 miles you had to sleep in a tent overnight every night for six nights and you had to raise a minimum of $22,000 in order to do it and that had never been done before and I went to the gay lesbian center in Los Angeles and I said look I think this thing could net $600,000 for you guys and they put their faith in me and they put up a $5,000 investment to launch it and we signed a contract and the very next morning I woke up in a state of Terror like what the hell have I done how on Earth am I going to get 500 people to ride their bikes from San Francisco to Los Angeles and to raise $2,000 each I'm going to be laughed at this is going to fail dismally I'm going to be ridiculed I'm going to waste their $50,000 I should just give the money back and quit but I didn't and we went ahead with the ride and it ended up netting not $600,000 but a little over a million dollar and on that basis we were invited to do an AIDS ride from Boston to New York and so same thing uh we signed a contract with Charities here in that case they put up a couple hundred, to invest in it and the exact same thing occurred the the night before I was supposed to fly to Boston to start work on that event just gripped with fear and my mind started saying all right you got this nice little event in California you got this cozy little thing it's working out really well you're going to screw that up and screw this up you know this is a California thing people in Boston and New York aren't going to want to ride their bikes the way they do in California and you're going to have to recruit people in the winter time how you going to get people to think about riding their bikes in the summer and the winter time and it's the New York Market you know West Hollywood sure you could organize it in West Hollywood how you going to penetrate the New York market and it sounds a little light harded in retrospect but in the moment it's very black and very dark and very shadowy and and very terrifying and you know the thought was there look I haven't spent any of this money yet just give the money back to them and tear up the contracts and say I'm sorry I made a mistake and that feels really real in that moment but we didn't and the Boston New York AIDS ride went ahead and it became the most successful firsttime AIDS fund riser in history it raised $7.4 million in its first year and on that basis we began expanding the AIDS rides all over the United States and in the midst of that looked at the issue of breast cancer which had similar Dynamics where people's mothers and daughters are dying and there was nothing big you could do but you know stick a pink ribbon on your sweater and so we said let's do something big for breast cancer and we came up with this idea of a 3-Day Walk 60 miles long from Santa Barbara all the way to Malibu same deal you had to sleep in a tent you had to raise $1,200 and this time we got a Fortune 500 company to invest they put up $350,000 for us to do it and you know you you you you know what I'm going to say next the same thing started to happen all right this is this is ridiculous it was about the bikes that's why the AIDS rides were successful it was the bikes people aren't going to want to walk these long distances what are you nuts you know you get this nice business in the AIDS rides you're going to you're going to destroy that whole thing and now you got a big reputation and and and uh and it's a Fortune 500 company they're going to sue you for misrepresenting what you could actually achieve you know and and and and sure organizing the gay community was easy it's compartmentalized in the Fenway and the Castro and West Hollywood and the village women they're dispersed all how you going to organize women but we went ahead and the first breast cancer 3-day netted four times as much as the first AIDS right it netted $4 million in its first iteration and over the course of n years as Chris said we had 182,000 people ride or walk in one of these events that I was convinced were going to fail they raised a total of $581 million it was more money raised more quickly for these causes than any events in history thank you thank you so how do you deal with this fear when it comes up well I can only tell you what I've learned and these are the few things that I've learned first of all you have to know that it's normal you have to expect that it's coming the moment you commit yourself to something great you can count on it a great sense of Terror is going to overcome you it's not it's natural nothing's wrong nothing's broken it's actually a sign that you're doing something great the more terror that you feel the more you know you're up to something really big if you don't expect it if it's a surprise if it seems unnatural to you if it feels like this shouldn't be happening something's broken something's wrong then it's going to undermine you what happens when you think something's wrong you abort right that's the logical thing to do that's why they have those big red abort buttons and rocket something feels like it's going wrong press the abort button so that's the first thing know that it's completely normal to feel terrified nothing's wrong the second thing is don't get ahead of yourself the way that I did on that bike ride you know eart tole who wrote The Power of Now talks about how we as human beings we really worry you know we worry about a lot of things and we create these movies in our heads where I'm I'm losing my job and I don't have enough money for my kids tuition and maybe I should divorce him or her and this and we try to cope with these situations in our mind but we can't because they don't actually exist and you can't cope with something that doesn't exist about 15 years ago I got my uh private pilot's license and on the day that I was going to solo I decided that this would be a really good time to stop you know another panic attack right after lunch and I I started thinking like yeah I've had I've had a lot of fun and I've gotten to fly with the instructor and I've learned a lot but and then this movie starts to occur in my mind and I see the plane going down and I see flames and I'm in it and then I see fire engines on the runway and then I see a funeral and my parents are there and then I see a cemetery you know I'm getting way ahead of myself and so I said to myself well you could quit yes but you don't have to quit right now at 2:00 you could quit at 3:00 you could quit at 5:00 you could quit when you get to the airport I said all right that's a good plan so so I went to the airport and I got in the plane and my instructor and I did a bunch of what they called touch and goes and on the fifth or six touch and go he said all right pull over you're doing great I'm going to get out of the plane and you're going to go do it yourself and in that moment I felt such a sense of relief and freedom that he was finally getting out of the plane he wasn't going to be looking over my shoulder at everything that I did and when I was living in that movie I could not possibly have anticipated that you know there's a an acronym in alcoholic synonymous for fear Fe a r false evidence appearing real that's what these concoctions are in our mind so I got in the plane and I went and I did a bunch of touch and goes and it was I had so much fun so don't get ahead of yourself and the third thing is use the fear let the energy let the adrenaline motivate you I have a friend who's a famous record executive and I I said you know do you do you still worry now that you're so successful he says I worry all the time I get paid to worry you know use that fear to fuel your creativity when I got so afraid about the Boston New York AIDS ride I thought yeah that New York issue is real what are we going to do about that we should take out a full page ad in the New York Times but we don't have the money to do that let's get our sponsor to do it we did we took out a full page ad in the New York Times it raised about $3 million and it became the future of the way we would advertise these events so that fear was really valuable so those are the things I've learned know that it's normal don't get ahead of yourself and use the fear yeah but what if I do all that and what if I fail what if I fail I don't know anybody great who hasn't failed and failed a lot I've failed a lot I think the most profound question is not what if I fail the most profound question is what if I never fail what if I never take a risk what if I'm so cautious that I never learn anything big what if I'm so afraid to fail that I never really live thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]