World-changing billionaire entrepreneurial icons like Mark Cuban, Elon Musk and Larry Page have to be somehow different than most humans, right? They must have an outsized ability to manage risk and to sit with fear. It is tempting to see them as different in an effort to understand their superhuman success.
Spoiler alert: They're not. They feel fear too.
"Everyone I know feels fear sometimes — you don't always see it, especially when you're looking at very senior leaders and innovators," says Adam Grant, the No. 1 professor at top-tier business school Wharton, best-selling author and management consultant to the likes of Facebook, Google, Goldman Sachs and the NBA. "But fear is a natural emotional response to an uncertain situation where you don't know how it's going to play out, you really care about the outcome and there's a real probability of negative consequences."