BE THE FIRST ONE TO CLAP

WATCHING ORDINARY PEOPLE make extraordinary change happen every day in my position at Change.org inspired me to write a book about how everyone—from managers to budding entrepreneurs and from parents to teenagers to retirees—can start their own movements. I believe wholeheartedly that every single person has the capacity to start and lead a movement that changes the world; you don’t need to be Nelson Mandela or Gloria Steinem to inspire change. Even the biggest movements in history were sparked by relatively small but critically important actions of key people along the way. The civil rights movement would not have been the same without Rosa Parks and the sit-in movement sparked by the Greensboro Four. Historian David Carter’s research showed that it was homeless youth who first resisted police in the Stonewall riots that ultimately led to the gay rights movement. And the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was successful thanks to the stories of individuals such as a woman with cerebral palsy who was denied access to a movie theater, and a wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran who could not get on and off the bus and faced employment discrimination.

Tiffany Shlain, a filmmaker and founder of the Webby Awards, created a great short film called 50/50. In it, she talks about the number of women who have been elected heads of state and why that number is still so small—only fifty. Shlain interviews Laura Liswood, the secretary general of the UN Foundation Council of Women World Leaders, which works with all the women who currently lead countries across the globe. Liswood sees firsthand what leads to major change—in her case, to the election of female leaders—and she, too, sees change as something that starts with a small action that grows much bigger. She says, “Change itself goes from the unthinkable, to the impossible, to the inevitable, but someone has to move it along. I often liken it to a standing ovation. A few people jump up and say this is the best thing that they have ever seen, and another larger group gets up and says yes, yes this was just excellent, and then a large group gets up and says yeah, yeah, this was okay, and finally the last group gets up because they can’t see the stage.” Similarly with movements, if you know your goal and focus on your first step as a starting point—what starts small can become enormous.

As the mother of two daughters who dance, I get to witness this type of “ripple effect” in action at their performances all the time. When a particular dancer does a long set of especially good turns or a difficult acrobatic trick, often a single member of the audience will start clapping, and it’s a nearly instantaneous ripple, with other people quickly joining in to clap, too. (Okay, I admit that my kids are usually highly embarrassed by this because the first person clapping is often me . . .) You start a movement when you’re the first one to stand up and clap.

ONE PERSON CAN START A CHAIN REACTION

THAT FIRST CLAP can be very small. On June 17, 2013, thirty-four-year-old Erdem Gündüz walked to the middle of Istanbul’s busy Taksim Square and stood completely still. He stood still there with his hands in his pockets for eight hours, from 6:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m., in peaceful silent protest after the removal of a tent city created there by activists and demonstrators who had been brutalized by police.

Although for the first several hours he stood alone, after a few hours several people joined him, then more and more until hundreds of people were standing there together with him. “Standing Man,” as Gündüz was soon called, inspired people not only in Taksim Square but also across the country, and then around the world. His actions went viral with the hashtag #duranadam (standing man). People stood in places where others had been killed by police. They stood in front of media organizations that they thought were downplaying the protests and concerns of citizens. They stood in courthouses where lawyers had been beaten and arrested for representing protesters.

His silent, motionless protest soon inspired activists around the world to strike the same pose, and sparked a feeling of international solidarity as photos and videos of the remarkable event made their way around the world via social media. By seemingly “doing nothing,” Gündüz became a spark that spread worldwide, increasing awareness of the issues that citizens are facing in Turkey. And though the challenges there continue, this silent movement brought attention to the situation at a critical time and was an important moment in a continuing march.

Erdem Gündüz standing in Taksim Square

MARCO LONGARI/STAFF

If that sounds too remote an example, consider this. When I first got to college, I was a young and bright-eyed coxswain on the rowing team. The coxswain, or “cox,” sits in the back of the boat on a rowing team and is responsible for the steering and speed of the boat and improving the team’s technique during practice. The cox also creates strategy and motivates and coaches the crew during races.

I coxed the men’s crew team for two years in high school at Pacific Rowing Club in San Francisco, which was an incredible experience for me, helping me build not only my leadership skills but also my self-confidence at an age when confidence doesn’t always come easily for teenage girls. I knew I wanted to continue coxing and assumed I would cox the men’s team in college as well. But when I got to Cornell and told them I wanted to cox the men, they said no, that it wasn’t possible for a woman to cox the men’s crew: only men could be on the men’s team and only women could be on the women’s team.

Their response made no sense to me.

Because, really, why not?

When I asked them that, this was the answer: “Well, the team is all men, and you might be distracting to them.” Clearly, that was an inadequate answer, though one that unfortunately endures. Women scientists who were told they might be too distracting to the male scientists in their labs sent a flood of #distractinglysexy tweets in 2015. (My favorite was from @SarahMDurant—“Nothing like a sample tube full of cheetah poop to make you #distractinglysexy.”)

All the coaches’ answers felt like excuses, so I asked them, “Why don’t you just let me try out? If I turn out to be bad at it, then don’t take me on the team. But I have experience and believe I’m actually quite good at it, so let me at least give it a shot.”

Sorry, they said. It’s policy.

Adding to my frustration from not understanding “policy” as the reason was that the qualifications for the role don’t have anything to do with gender. In fact, they might slightly favor women. Good coxswains are strategic, calm under pressure, good multitaskers, and are excellent at understanding and motivating their teams. Research has shown that women are actually better at several of the key skills a great coxswain needs, including cognitive empathy, multitasking, and even performing under pressure, at least as measured in some sports. And coxswains need to be small and light. (The target weight for collegiate coxswains is 120 pounds for men’s and 110 pounds for women’s.) So yes, not only are women generally quite good at the skills required, but they are also often closer to the target weight than men.

I knew that I was qualified and believed I would be an asset to the men’s crew team, so I kept trying. I went to two or three different coaches on the men’s team, and they all gave me the same answer—a flat-out no. I went to the athletic director of the university and told him that I didn’t think their policy made any sense, and he, too, said no. Like the other coaches, he didn’t understand why I cared so much, why it mattered. Why wouldn’t I just cox for the women? I didn’t want my previous experience to go to waste, and I wholeheartedly believed I would be excellent at coxing men. And while I was fighting this particular battle for myself, I didn’t believe any woman should have to settle for a no because of her gender.

But in the end, though I was passionate about this cause and willing to fight for it, I gave in. After going up through the ranks of decision-makers at the university, I felt that I’d taken it as far as I could. I just didn’t know what else to do. Looking back, I am a bit disappointed in myself that I let go of the fight so easily. I wonder, if the Internet had existed then (am I really that old?), whether I might have tried using social media or starting an online petition or doing something else to call attention to an issue that I believed needed reconsideration. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, so I’ll really never know. At the time, though, I let it go and joined the women’s team as coxswain.

However, it turns out that even without social media or a petition, those small actions I took did matter. About three months into the semester, I got a call from the athletic director. “We’ve been talking about it ever since you came to us, and we’ve changed our minds. We’re going to change the policy. So if you’d like, you can cox the men’s team.” After discussing it more, they decided it made sense to base the role on skill (and size) rather than on gender.

I was surprised by their reversal and that they were actually going to change their policy—one that had been discriminatory. While I didn’t switch to the men’s team out of my already deep-seated loyalty to the women’s team, I was heartened to know that I had encouraged them to change the policy. And I felt even better when my freshman Big Red boat of amazing women rowers I coxed won the national championship that year for our division.

The most fulfilling part of the athletic department’s change in policy wasn’t the outcome for me. It was knowing that, because of this decision, other women would not have to fight the same battle. Helping to change that one policy in college gave me my first taste of what it felt like to stand up for something I believed in. After this experience, I realized that even small actions, and one lone voice, could make a lasting difference. A few years ago, when I was back at Cornell speaking with the crew team, I asked one of the rowers how many of the coxswains on the men’s team were women. “Almost all of them,” she said. “It just makes sense, right?”

It does make sense, and not just because there’s a size requirement for the job, which happens to be easier for women to fill than men. Women coxing men’s crew has now become the norm at most universities, because they’re good at it.

YOU CAN SEE how consequential one small action can be. Now imagine what a difference the accumulation of many small actions can make. The combined power of many small actions, and many individuals taking action, is the only thing that truly has the power to create change.

WHAT HOLDS US BACK

ALL THAT SAID, it can be difficult to get started—to get up in front of everyone to stand up and clap. Sara El-Amine, the social change veteran whom I introduced in the last chapter, told me that there are four basic reasons why most people don’t take action to try to create change:

While all of these obstacles need to be overcome in order to create forward momentum for a cause you want to support or an idea you want to pursue and bring to fruition, it’s that first one—not believing in your own ability to effect change—that keeps most people from getting started. It is why it’s so important to hear the stories of people who have taken action and successfully made change happen in order to imagine yourself actually doing the thing you dream of doing. The more you see examples of ordinary people doing extraordinary things for causes they believe in, the more you’ll start believing that you, too, can make a difference. That anyone can do this.

Because anyone can do this.

So how do we transform our good intentions into taking steps to create change? How do we ignore the voice that says “I can’t” or “Why bother?” and instead see that hope and a sense of purpose are all we really need to make a difference?

SOMETIMES WHAT KEEPS us from stepping forward to take action is a misplaced sense that we haven’t earned the right to have a voice in certain movements, that perhaps we don’t belong in particular fights in our communities or in our companies because we are outsiders to those struggles. I know I’ve felt this way many times. As I write about my life, it’s impossible for me not to acknowledge how much privilege I’ve had as a white American born to upper-middle-class parents. I also had what Ben Rattray, the founder of Change.org, calls “love privilege” because I always felt loved and supported by my family. All of these advantages have certainly made my life easier, and for that I’m grateful.

And as a woman and a Jew, I’ve gotten a glimpse into what it feels like to know that the world may treat you differently just because of who you are. I have also seen some of the experiences of my sister Bonnie, who is black and joined our family in her teens, which gives me a small window into the challenges she encounters. Not only have I observed the direct racism she faces, but in talking with her to try to understand more about her experience, I have also learned from her about the often indirect racism she sees. Examples such as people saying to her, “Oh, you’re not black,” because she grew up in a white neighborhood and went to mainly white private schools, a comment people may mean as a compliment, but which in itself is deeply hurtful and ignores the reality of her daily experience of being black in America.

This is complicated stuff. Though people don’t often talk about race and privilege, we should. Only by being open to hearing and understanding each other’s stories can we break down walls of misunderstanding and hate over time. We shouldn’t let fear of saying the wrong thing stop us from taking action or even just asking questions, especially if we have good intentions. We may make mistakes in how we go about trying to be an ally, but it’s better than not trying at all. And by engaging in the conversation and participating in the movements of groups we ourselves are not a part of, we can learn about both what makes us each unique and the bonds that tie us all together.

ASK “WHY NOT ME?”

THOUGH SOME OF us may come from more privilege than others, all of us have the ability to make a difference. People who come from struggle have powerful stories to tell. And people whose lives have been easier also have stories to tell. They don’t need to harbor the guilt that can come with privilege, but rather take advantage of the opportunity to use that privilege to do something that matters.

My mother was the one to teach me that lesson (and many others). When my mom was still in her twenties, newly married to my dad, she received some unexpected and very difficult news: she had cancer in her parotid gland on the right side of her neck, and to treat it she would have to go through major surgery and months of radiation. It’s hard to imagine how frightening that must have been for both of them as a young couple just starting out, not knowing whether she would make it through the surgery, and if she did, whether or not they would be able to have a family. Thankfully, the operation to remove the tumor was successful in saving her life. But during the procedure, the surgeon accidentally severed one of her facial nerves. Half of her face would forever be paralyzed.

I never knew my mother to look any other way. I never knew her with a different face—one that didn’t cause people to stare, or ask what was wrong with her, or whisper about it without ever asking. Yet through all of this, she always handled herself with incredible grace and confidence, never complaining, never shying away from challenges, and never letting a physical setback get in her way. She put a strong, warm, half-crooked smile on life, proving to me, through her actions and behavior, that anything was possible because she believed that anything was possible. I watched as she changed careers in her thirties, leaving a job in speech pathology to attend business school at night. Despite the difficulty of trying to start a new career as a woman and a latecomer, and with the added stress of a physical difference she couldn’t hide, my mom didn’t give up. She didn’t give up when night school made it difficult to meet all her other commitments, and she didn’t give up when she had fifty (yes, fifty) interviews, without receiving a job offer. It was her fifty-first interview that got her foot in the door at Towers Perrin, a leading HR consulting firm where she spent the next twenty years, eventually becoming one of their most successful consulting partners.

Now that’s grit.

When I look at my mother, I see someone who never once asked “Why me?” when it came to her facial paralysis or any other obstacle she’s faced, but rather someone who had always said, “Why not me?” when it came to issues in the world she believed needed to be addressed.

Both of my parents grew up in modest surroundings, with just enough to get by, appreciative of the opportunities with which they were presented. My mom tells us stories about working her way through college and keeping a ledger of everything she spent, down to the penny, to make sure she could make it through the month. These types of experiences led my parents to a lifetime of hard work, and then later, when they became successful, to have a passion for giving back. Just as my mom never doubted her ability to improve her own life, she also never wavered in her belief that she could have a positive impact on others’ lives. From donating money to causes they cared about to volunteering for the Red Cross emergency team (with supplies always in the trunk of their car) to opening our home to Bonnie, an amazing young woman in her teens who is now my third sister, my mom and dad always stepped up. They saw something that needed to be done and they did it; they saw people who were in need of help and they offered it. They always said, “Why not me?”

That question—Why not me?—is central to whether or not we will go through life daring to participate in improving the world. Will we be brave enough to take steps to make change, or will we stand back and wait for others to act?

So many of us see the injustices happening around us and feel overwhelmed or powerless to do anything. And so many of us have exciting new ideas that we believe can solve problems, but feel we don’t know enough to make our dreams a reality. I have been in that position many times myself. I can look back with regret at the times I wish I had done more, been a better ally to someone in pain, fought more for the causes or ideas I believe in.

“Why not me?” is the voice of change and hope, the voice that allows you to take a first step toward following a purpose and creating a movement, righting wrongs and fixing what’s broken in the world, or creating solutions to meet people’s needs. It’s what makes you stand up for what you believe in, even if your legs are shaking when you do.

PURPOSE IS AN EQUALIZER

THOUGH IT’S COMMON to be afraid that we don’t have the experience or expertise to contribute to a cause, sometimes messages with meaningful purpose are the most powerful when they come from unexpected voices. Sarah Kavanagh, a socially minded teenager from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, became vegan at age twelve based on her love of animals. Because Sarah was vegan, she was conscious about ingredients in her food and drinks. So in 2012, at age fifteen, Sarah Googled the ingredients on the label of a bottle of Gatorade, her favorite sports drink, and saw an ingredient listed that she’d never heard of—brominated vegetable oil (BVO). After a bit more research, she learned that BVO, which is used to keep citrus drinks from separating and contains the same ingredient (bromine) as brominated flame retardants, was removed from the FDA’s GRAS (Generally Regarded as Safe) list in 1970. Although BVO is banned in over one hundred countries, including Japan, India, and most of Europe, BVO was still in most American energy drinks and many other soft drinks. This didn’t make sense to her. “I looked it up and the first article that came up was from Scientific American that talked about all of these crazy side effects that could be caused by BVO,” she told me. “They included reduced fertility, early onset puberty, impaired neurological development—absolutely horrendous things that are caused by an ingredient in something that’s supposed to be a health product and that’s aimed at athletes. We knew that this was harming people. Why, if this information was so easily available, wasn’t anyone talking about it? Why wasn’t it something that people cared about?”

Sarah decided to take action. She was familiar with Change.org because of her support for animal rights and had signed other successful petitions, so she started one herself, asking Pepsi to remove BVO from Gatorade. She wasn’t sure the company would listen. As she told me, “I did think it could work because I had seen other people do it, but it’s different when you’re doing it yourself. Going through a process like this, you tend to see other people on a different level than you see yourself.” As a teenager, she didn’t feel as if she had the authority to speak up for a cause that would require a change from a multinational corporation. Sarah voiced a fear that many of us feel: “I didn’t necessarily expect anyone to care and I definitely did not expect a corporation to actually listen to us.”

But Sarah’s voice was powerful, and listen to her they did. In fact, it may have been because she was such an unexpected voice speaking up on this issue that she was able to get so much attention. People were signing the petition both because they cared about their health and because Sarah inspired them. And when they signed, they shared their support with their networks, which accelerated its growth dramatically. About a month after she started the campaign, it had gathered 17,000 signatures. And Sarah was really excited, thinking to herself, “Wow, these are actual people; 17,000 people have read something that I wrote, have paid attention to a cause I care about and they’re standing up with me. It was really cool.” Thanks to the early success, Change.org was starting to get media inquiries about Sarah’s petition. Change.org staff reached out to her to let her know she had been invited to the Today show and The Dr. Oz Show as well as many other outlets to talk about her campaign and the dangers of BVO.

At The Dr. Oz Show, Sarah was in the greenroom with an expert from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a prominent consumer advocacy group that focuses on food safety and nutrition and that was central to changes like the labeling and reduction of trans fats in our food. He told Sarah that he’d been trying to get BVO banned for years without much success. “He said,” as Sarah recounted to me, “‘I just want to let you know that our organization has been fighting for decades to do what you’ve done in only months.’” Incredibly, a fifteen-year-old with an online petition was able to achieve massive momentum and attract national attention in six short months, whereas more experienced advocates had been working for years to publicize their cause.

Sarah was a Gatorade fan—she wasn’t doing this to hurt Pepsi as a company, she was speaking up to ask them to make the change so that she and others like her could feel confident they were being safe when continuing to drink Gatorade. And because she had created a movement of people supporting the cause, she didn’t feel alone: “People would send me e-mails and would message me on Facebook and would tweet at me. I had constant support always coming in from people, so I never felt like it was me versus a big corporation. I felt like it was me and all these people from all over the world telling Pepsi that we’d like them to change.”

Though Pepsi wasn’t very responsive at first, not replying to e-mails and agreeing to only a brief conversation, in January of 2013, less than three months after she started the petition, Pepsi announced it would remove BVO from Gatorade, making Sarah’s campaign a success. And she didn’t stop there. Her first step led to another, and then another: after she won her first campaign to have BVO removed from Gatorade, she started a campaign asking Coca-Cola to take the same ingredient out of Powerade. Ultimately, both Pepsi and Coca-Cola decided to take BVO out of every single one of their drinks, around the world.

Despite all of her successes, this huge turning point shocked and amazed Sarah. “When I first found out that BVO would be removed, I cried,” she told me. Even talking about that moment years later made her emotional, and not just because it was a major success for a cause that she had championed. Being able to convince two enormous corporations drove home just how much power she had as an advocate. Sarah explains, “As a woman and as someone from Mississippi, from the South, I’ve always felt like I’ve had to work harder for things, which sucks, but in that moment I realized I had actually done something substantial. Something that actually mattered. It didn’t matter that the odds were against me. I worked hard for this and I put all my emotions and energy into trying to change things. And it had finally happened. It was the most empowering moment of my life.”

Sarah learned that even though she wasn’t the most “obvious” person to start this movement, she could do it anyway, and her conviction in her purpose carried her through. “You’ve just got to go for it,” she told me. “You can’t underestimate yourself, otherwise change is never going to be made. You can’t sit back and assume that somebody on a different level than you is going to do something. What’s the point in being silent?”

Sarah Kavanaugh with Dr. Oz

CHANGE.ORG

And that’s true for all our voices. Even if it feels like others might have more experience or more reason to speak up, what matters is actually doing it. If a teenager from Mississippi could start a movement to make soft drinks healthier for all of us, then you can start a movement to serve a cause you care about, too. What’s important to remember is that Sarah didn’t start out saying, “I’m going to get the biggest soft drink companies in the world to take this ingredient out of every product they have.” She started out by making a single suggestion, expressing her belief that the ingredient was unnecessary, then seeing if others would agree with her. From a fifteen-year-old’s small initial action came a groundswell of support, which led to change.

IICDTICDA

FEAR STOPS MANY of us from taking action. A voice inside our head asks, What if I fail? What if people criticize me? What if my idea is just not good? Well, what if, instead of succumbing to that fear, we could keep moving forward despite it? One way to do that is to get practice first, by doing other things that frighten us.

When I was growing up, my family used acronyms to communicate in shorthand. It was our secret language. This was before texting, of course, so we actually had a list of translations stuck to the refrigerator to keep us fluent. There was “SYU” (Since You’re Up), used when you were sitting on the couch and feeling too lazy to get something for yourself, and “FHB” (Family Hold Back), emergency code for when we would invite people over and suddenly realize that there wasn’t quite enough food for everyone unless we all took a little less than usual. When I went off to college, the tradition continued with acronyms like “IMS,” which stood for In My Sweats, an easy one-liner to decline evening invitations to go out with friends when you were already settled in for the night, and “GU,” Geographically Undesirable, which described people who lived too far away to make a potential relationship practical or appealing.

You’d think with so much practice coming up with snappy acronyms that I could have done better than the horribly long IICDTICDA. But even though the clumsy pronunciation of the acronym (“icked-tickda”) is inelegant, it drives many of my decisions and has helped me become the person I want to be:

If I can do this, I can do anything.

I’m not—and never have been—a fearless person, but I figured out long ago that the way for me to become less scared of doing big or unknown things was to do other things that scared me, early and often. It helped me get used to the idea of fear, and of failure, and it made other things seem easier in comparison.

The first time I put IICDTICDA to use was when my parents sent me, at fifteen, to a summer camp for troubled teens in New Mexico designed to build inner strength and grit. My parents had sent my younger sister, Deb, there the summer before, and though she had left home as a somewhat insecure and anxious tween, she came back with life-changing confidence and resilience. So the following summer they sent us both.

Of all the many activities, the one I remember most is a daylong ropes course that ended on top of a cliff where an almost completely vertical zip line awaited. I can still see myself standing there, paralyzed in fear, letting everyone go ahead of me, which only prolonged my misery. I watched each of my peers leap off the edge of the cliff and free-fall for what seemed like an eternity, until it was my turn. My friends chanted, “Ice cream and soda, pretzels and beer, come on, Jen, get your butt down here!” which, not surprisingly, I didn’t find encouraging. I could have turned around and said, “I can’t do this”; I was just a kid and this was just camp, after all. But somehow, even then, quitting didn’t seem like an option. Instead, I thought: Can I convince myself that if I can do this, I’ll be able to do lots of other things I’m afraid of? (Yes, even as a teenager standing on the edge of a cliff, I managed a somewhat rational thought.)

So I took that leap—literally and figuratively. And even though I hated every second of the terrifying descent of that zip line, I realized what had given me the courage to do it: as afraid as I was of jumping off that cliff, I was much more afraid of being the kind of person who would walk away from an opportunity just because I was scared.

IICDTICDA guided me to do other things that scared me, like join the volunteer fire department and spend a semester of college in the Brazilian Amazon studying rainforest ecology. Although I was originally planning to study in Italy, I wanted to make the most of the opportunity to study abroad and to push myself as far as possible outside my comfort zone. So I found the catalog from the School for International Training, and I decided on a semester in the rainforest. Unsure of what lay ahead, I packed up my belongings and hopped on a plane to the Amazon (actually, two planes, a bus, and a boat).

I knew that going to Brazil would be difficult for all the obvious reasons—the rural parts of the country where I would spend half my time were remote, without electricity or running water, and in this case also full of wild animals. And yet, as it turned out, those things were not what was most challenging for me. Sure, there were some terrifying moments involving snakes, tarantulas, and giant poisonous ants. But unexpectedly, the hardest part for me was not knowing the language and being unable to communicate with the people around me. Although I had studied other Romance languages, I hadn’t studied Portuguese beforehand. I knew it would be difficult, but I hadn’t truly understood what it would feel like to think so hard; from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep, I had a headache every day and felt as helpless as a child. In this case, hard work paid off; by the end of my time in Brazil, I was a strong communicator (though no guarantees on the accuracy of my Portuguese grammar). But experiencing the frustration of not being able to communicate as easily as I was used to gave me an enormous amount of empathy for people who face language and cultural barriers, which sticks with me to this day. Overall, the experience gave me confidence in my ability to thrive in many other new situations. It’s much easier to tackle difficult challenges in your life and career if you push yourself early to try things you haven’t done before. And the scarier the better—within reason, of course.

Note that putting yourself in frightening situations to practice overcoming fear doesn’t mean that you won’t still feel afraid. Like the time I went to India to visit one of our Change.org teams (with my family in tow) and agreed to go on the collectively-decided-upon group activity: a cycling tour of Old Delhi.

Now, I realize that thousands of people who live in Delhi ride bicycles through this part of the city every day, so it is not in and of itself a challenging activity, but anyone who knows me well knows that I’m the least likely person to want to cycle through one of the most congested cities in the world. I grew up in San Francisco, where the steep hills make bike riding seem more like an extreme sport. Consequently, I didn’t learn to ride a bicycle until my twenties (which, by the way, is quite embarrassing because I still fell a lot when I was learning, and most people do not expect to see adults falling off their bikes).

In the abstract, the challenge made me nervous enough. But once I was actually on my bike, with my helmet on and my husband and two daughters in front of me, and speeding motorcycles, tuk tuks, other cyclists, pedestrians, and several dozen cows swarming all around me, my nervousness escalated to a full state of panic. I was terrified for myself as well as for my family—especially my young daughters. I’m sure my team would have understood and let me off the hook. There would be plenty of other opportunities for good old-fashioned team building when we weren’t all risking death on two wheels. But as usual, I couldn’t ignore the leading-by-example voice in my head. Plus, I didn’t want my daughters to be thrown off by my fear.

Aside from my hitting two people with my bicycle (luckily they weren’t hurt since I was going so painfully slowly) and getting smacked in the face with a cow’s tail, our Old Delhi adventure turned out to be an amazing experience. Not only did I live to tell this story, but my daughters, Rachel and Emma, who were riding in front of me the whole time, also did incredibly well. Compared to me, they were much better at navigating the traffic and all the obstacles we faced, so much so that at some point during that extremely stressful ride I had a life-epiphany moment: They were able to stare down their own fear and keep going. They were going to be okay.

I often hear entrepreneurs say that fearlessness led to their success. My successes have not been due to a lack of fear on my part but rather a result of the willingness to keep going despite my fear. I see true courage in having fear and moving forward anyway. The fight-or-flight response is so deeply woven into our DNA that risk aversion is a completely natural instinct. It’s normal to be afraid of dangerous things; it’s fear that keeps us from running toward truly life-threatening situations and protects us from harm. In our modern lives, though, we primarily fear failure. Many of us spend a great deal of time and energy avoiding what scares us—whether it’s being adventurous in the outdoors, public speaking, asking out someone we like, or taking a chance on a new job that feels like a big risk. What if, instead of beating ourselves up for wanting to avoid risk and uncertainty and all the things that scare us, we took those chances anyway?

There is a dirty little secret that few people talk about—the first time you do anything, you’ve never done it before. It’s true for everyone. It’s certainly true of every single milestone in my life: the first step I took, my first day of school, my first kiss, having my first child, my first job, my first day as a manager, my first day as a CEO . . . you get the idea. And it’s true for everyone else around us, no matter how impressive they may appear; they had a “first day,” too. Somehow, we all manage not only to get through these firsts but also to become quite adept at those activities over time. Yet once we gain expertise, we often forget the first-day feeling and again fear failure. If, instead, we could remember the feeling of trying something new and learning we could be good at it, then when we are faced with those moments where we have an idea we want to pursue or a change we want to make, we can remind ourselves that we can do it, even if—especially if—it’s difficult.

START ANYWHERE—JUST START

WITH ALL OF that in mind, remember: getting started is the most important thing you can do. Even actions that may feel inconsequential to you initially may result in a major movement. That’s what happened for Alli Webb, a professional stylist who, with her brother, my longtime friend Michael Landau, cofounded Drybar, a national chain of salons devoted to blow-drying hair.

Alli had spent most of her childhood, as well as her personal and professional life, trying to tame her unruly hair until she finally mastered the art of the blowout. And she found surprising power in the simple pleasure of having her hair blow-dried. She told me, “I have naturally curly hair, and as a young girl I used to beg my mom to blow-dry my hair straight. Of course, back then I couldn’t articulate it, but when my mom would blow out my hair I was so happy, and I felt so good.”

Alli knew that having “challenging” hair wasn’t something completely unique to her—as someone with naturally very curly hair, I can relate. So she had a hunch that other women would love getting blowouts, too. (Michael didn’t get it at first. He told me, “I honestly didn’t understand why a woman would need someone else to blow-dry her hair. I’m bald, and I don’t dry my hair.”)

Her husband, Cam, who did advertising, design, and branding, made her a website. “We called it Straight at Home,” she told me. “Cam said that if we had a great website, people would call me, and they did. I posted the site on lots of mommy blogs, and off I went.” Alli underscored that the early incarnation of Drybar was just a way to get out of the house and earn a little extra cash doing something she enjoyed. She was charging forty dollars per blowout, had a duffel bag full of brushes and hair products, and started going to all these “mommy friends’” houses to do their hair. She was very fulfilled by what she was doing and that she was able to do it on her own schedule.

And then her business started growing. People loved it—she had the start of a movement on her hands because she was building something great. As she told me, “Then this little business started booming. It wasn’t until I got really busy and had more demand than supply of me that I hit a crossroads: Do I expand and hire other stylists to fill this demand? Michael and I started talking about opening an actual brick-and-mortar shop so that these women could come to me instead of me going to them. That’s how the whole thing came to be. But it was still just going to be one shop. There was never a grand plan for what has happened.”

So she started small and she wasn’t quite sure where it would lead. She had one other key insight along the way, which was that she didn’t have to do everything on her own. In fact, both Alli and Michael credit the success of Drybar to the fact that there were four partners, each with unique skills, that together created the right blend of leadership they needed to be successful. The business started with Alli, Cam, Michael, and their friend Josh Heitler, an incredible architect who agreed to design the first store in exchange for equity in the company. As Michael told me, “We had this perfect storm of an unbelievable designer and architect who was putting his blood, sweat, and tears into the business. We had Cam, who was this crazy-talented marketing and advertising guy who we would never have been able to afford, but he’s Alli’s husband. And then we had Alli, who had the idea, and the hair knowledge, of how to build this whole thing. And then me with the business side of it. So it all kind of came together.”

Alli had partners to help her move that idea first to a single brick-and-mortar store in Brentwood, California, and then to create what Drybar has now become—a popular, fast-growing brand with over seventy locations in the United States and Canada and a successful product line sold at Sephora, Nordstrom, and other retailers.

The Drybar movement came with a major insight behind it: when people look good, they feel good. And that gives them confidence to achieve other goals. So this idea that started as a very small business ended up growing rapidly, with the crucial purpose of helping women feel more confident about themselves. Michael finally came to that understanding a bit later. As he told me: “It took me longer to understand what Cam and Alli knew, but there was this personal moment where I realized that during my freshman year of college I started losing my hair, and it changed me. I was always an extrovert my whole life, but when I lost my hair I didn’t feel put together. One of our clients pointed out the correlation, that she doesn’t feel put together unless she comes to Drybar, so I thought, ‘Oh my God, if a woman feels a fraction of what I felt in college when I was losing my hair, then I understand what a giant opportunity this is.’”

And it is a huge opportunity, both to give people the confidence that comes from feeling like they look great and to build a huge business. Their customers actively talk about what a confidence-boosting experience a visit to Drybar is, as you can see in tweets like these: “Thanks @theDrybar! Yall always make me feel so confident and have the best stylists!” from @BelindaK04 and “Love starting my day @theDrybar. I always feel more confident than when I came in with frizz. Thanks for that #drybarhouston #curlyhairprob” from @claudiahualde. The Drybar movement grows every day, and their potential customers want it to get even bigger. On the Drybar Facebook page, you can see people asking for Drybar to come to their towns all across the United States:

“Please bring Drybar to Evanston”

“Please come to Chapel Hill, NC!”

“Any chance that you have a drybar opening in Buffalo, NY in the future? (Please say yes)”

“Please come to Madison, Wisconsin!!! You’re needed here!”

“When will you have a shop west of Westlake, CA!!?? You need to come to Carpinteria!! Santa Barbara!!”

Alli’s initial step led to what is now a nationwide movement, even though that wasn’t her expectation at the start.

We all have the power to create change, and the power to lead our own movements, whether they are small or large, local or national, a new law or a new business. They all start in the same way, with one person willing to take a risk—to be the first one to stand up and clap.