Doubt Not, Fear Not

“Even when we started Google, we thought, ‘Oh, we might fail,’ and we almost didn't do it. The reason we started is that Stanford said, ‘You guys can come back and finish your Ph.D.s if you don't succeed.’ Probably that one decision caused Google to be created. It's not clear we would have done it otherwise. We had all this internal risk we had just invented. It's not that we were going to starve or not get jobs or not have a good life or whatever, but you have this fear of failing and of doing something new, which is very natural. In order to do stuff that matters, you need to overcome that.”

(Larry Page, co-founder of Google, in “Larry Page on How to Change the World.” by Andy Serwer. Fortune: May 12, 2008. Vol. 157, Iss. 10; pg. 82)