I recently described my core competency to someone at a dinner party as fear manager. All my life’s greatest accomplishments and its greatest failures have been a result of managing my fear, or letting it beat me. Really taking the time to look the dragon in the mouth, the one that is either right in front of you, or a decade away, is fundamentally the thing that has dictated the pace of my success.I help people find and fight their dragons. I help them find the questions they must ask and answer to succeed in going somewhere totally new. As business leaders it is easy to get comfortable doing what we have always done, focusing on predictable incremental change. In technology, this is a path to irrelevance, and it is usually the fear of giving up what we know, that is holding us back. Larry Page wrote “Place big bets on the future. What seems big today won’t seem so wild in a few years time”. Elon Musk wrote, “You need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster” and it amazes me how often people who have found this level of success discuss this challenge. I love business for exactly this reason. Problem solving in real time, a need to make deep personal human connections, a challenge to consistently re-invent, find solutions no one else has, and challenge your honest fears.