Facing Fear to Become Fearless
Cara describes video games as one of the most exhilarating yet also most challenging categories she can think of: “It is a marriage of entertainment and technology, two areas always worrying about the next blockbuster, on the cutting edge of what is possible, with deadlines often changing hourly. A lot of things now ‘hot’ in the digital advertising space are what we’ve been doing for years. If you have that kind of experience and adaptability, there really is nothing you can’t tackle.”
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Cara also credits her success to great hiring. “My industry, and really all industries that media and advertising touch, moves so much faster today than even five years ago. You can’t know everything yourself. You need to hire skills for today and aptitude for tomorrow. It’s crucial to hire smarter people than yourself. It’s scary sometimes, but if I’m the smartest person in the room, I’m not only bored, I’m helping neither my clients nor my company.”
Celebrating the 5th anniversary of Fearless Media this month, leading a team of supremely talented and hard working employees out of her Manhattan office, Cara still has to pinch herself occasionally as to where the time went. “When I first started Fearless Media, I was pretty much working 24/7. That’s the reality of your first year or two. While it’s exhausting at times, it also provides the benefit of not really giving you a lot of time to worry about things, like second guessing whether it will work. You’re in the middle of it, you’re doing it and it IS working. Once you are able to make the mental transition from working as an employee to being a small business entrepreneur, you also begin to move from making strategic decisions rather than living moment to moment. It happens gradually, but is one of the most rewarding things I have experienced.”
Cara offers this final advice to anyone looking to break out on their own but afraid to do so: “You can think of a thousand reasons not to take the leap, but the truth is that you need to follow your instincts. If you are sitting in a job somewhere and are unhappy, that’s a horrible feeling to come to day after day. If you know in your heart that you can do what you are doing better on your own, or that you want to be doing something completely different, go do it. It doesn’t have to be perfect to succeed and if you give it your best, the odds are very good that it will go great.”
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