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1-Page Summary of Be Fearless
Overview
It’s important to get outside your bubble and embrace diversity, because diverse businesses perform better than non-diverse ones. However, only 10% of investment capital goes to businesses founded by women or minorities.
If you follow the news, you may have read a troubling article one day and thought “I should really do something about this.” It could be a local or international issue. But despite your concern and initial impulse to take action, your second thought might have been “I’d like to help but I can’t just change my life now. It’s too risky!”
Author Jean Case knows that taking action requires courage, and it’s much easier to do nothing or stay in your comfort zone. However, we need courageous people who want to make the world a better place. To inspire those who lack motivation and are afraid of doing something new, she decided to offer inspiration.
According to the author, five principles can help you become fearless. These are:
Make a Big Bet
Be a bold risk-taker
Make failures matter
Reach beyond your bubble
Let urgency conquer fear
We will take a look at examples of these principles in action and hopefully empower you to be more fearless in your everyday life by following some simple steps that trailblazing women have taken before us to achieve success and make their dreams come true.”
Big Idea #1: In order to make big changes, you need a big bet. You can’t just go from A to B, but have to think about how you’re going to get there.
In the early 1960s, no one knew exactly how the first human would set foot on the moon. However, US president John F. Kennedy made a bold promise to put a man on the moon within ten years of his speech.
The author refers to a Big Bet as an idea that can change the world and inspire people. To be fearless, you have to make Big Bets and take risks.
A Big Bet is a plan that challenges the common assumptions and gets people’s attention. It’s like when JFK made his famous speech, saying we would go to Mars by 2030. Elon Musk has taken this idea further by making plans for Tesla cars to be electric, which will help reduce pollution on Earth.
Elon Musk has faced a lot of criticism in the past, but he silenced some of those critics when his SpaceX program launched its own rocket.
The X Lab, which is a development lab founded by Google, was able to create an internet that uses balloons. This project was especially crazy because it helped Puerto Rico get back online after Hurricane Maria in 2017.
However, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to make a big bet. You can start one in any place and at any time. For example, Rachel Sumekh was just an ordinary student who decided that she would help other students by organizing food drives for them. She saw how many students were hungry despite the fact that they had enough money to buy groceries or go out and eat at restaurants.
Sumekh believed that she could make a difference in her community and started Swipe Out Hunger, an organization that helps students donate their unused food card money. The organization has now spread to over 30 campuses while delivering over 1.3 million meals.
Big Idea #2: Big bets can also start with a few assumptions, and then they will see what happens in the near future.
There are a lot of things that people accept as being true, even though they know there’s no reason why they should be. For example, someone might need new glasses and not be able to afford them, so he or she just accepts the fact that it’s too expensive to get new ones. But then there are people who aren’t afraid to defy common assumptions and show us how we can do better than what is considered normal. Two such fearless leaders are David Gilboa and Neil Blumenthal. One day Gilboa needed a pair of glasses but was upset by how much money he would have to pay for them; he thought that getting some decent eyewear shouldn’t cost nearly $700. So he decided to find an alternative solution instead of accepting this as simply “the way it is.”
