Pressure Makes The Player

"I’ll tell you something about me – I’m a paranoid person… I’m so scared of failure.”

When Emirati entrepreneur Mohamed Alabbar said these words on one of the stages at this year’s 1 Billion Followers Summit in Dubai, I’ll admit that I did a double take.

Here was one of the most successful businessmen in the MENA region – the driving force behind brands as celebrated as Emaar and Noon – admitting to the same anxieties and pressures that haunt most of us upstarts on a day-to-day basis.

“I’m so scared of embarrassing my family,” Alabbar shared. “I’m so scared of embarrassing my staff, my children… I am really a scared man.”

The fear of failure is something that gets talked about a lot in entrepreneurial circles. There’s no shortage of motivational speakers going hoarse exhorting us to “banish” such self-limiting thoughts, with the insinuation being that even remotely entertaining such concerns is in itself a failure. Fear, we are led to believe, is an obstacle.

But maybe that’s the wrong way of looking at it – as Alabbar continued with his candid admission, he said, “I run day and night, seven days a week, because I’m a paranoid guy, who came from nothing, and I became something because of so many great people in my life, and I don’t want to let them down.”

I believe there’s a powerful lesson to be learned from Alabbar’s honesty here: the journey to success can be paved with the very fears we’re often told to cast aside.

Instead of trying to suppress them, our anxieties and apprehensions can drive our discipline, sharpen our instinct, and allow us to persist and persevere, transforming doubt into determination and worry into work.

After all, as Alabbar’s story shows, success isn’t about the absence of fear – it’s really just about refusing to let it win.

Pictured on image: Mohammed Alabbar. Image courtesy mohamedalabbar.com.

This article first appeared in the January/February issue of Inc. Arabia magazine. To read the full issue online, click here.