Linda Rottenberg - Crazy Is a Compliment: The Power of Zigging When Everyone Else Zags

I want to tell you about Leila.

Leila Velez grew up in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Her mother was a maid; her father, a janitor. In the early 1990s Leila was serving hamburgers at McDonalds. But she had a dream.

Leila was frustrated by how few hair products there were for the curly locks of Afro-Brazilian women like her. Poor people deserve to feel beautiful, too, she told her sister-in-law Zica, a hairdresser. In 1993 the two amateurs turned Leilas basement into a mad scientists lab. They tested their first product on their husbands... and the mens hair promptly fell out.

Going back to the sink, Leila and Zica perfected their formula and opened a salon. It was an unimpressive place, down a dark corridor, a mere three hundred square feet. How can you be successful in such a pitiful space? their friends said. But the sisters pushed on. Soon women in Rio were waiting four to six hours for an appointment, and customers were crediting their products with not only improving their hair texture but also boosting their self-esteem.

When I tell this story to friends, they often say, That must be one of those charming stories we keep hearing about women in microfinance. But theres nothing micro about Leilas story. Within a few years her company, Beleza Natural, was selling an array of hair products in a handful of hair clinics. By 2013 Beleza Natural was serving 100,000 customers a month, employing 2,300 people, and earning $80 million a year.

So how did Leila do it? How did she go from being an hourly worker at McDonalds to the leader of a multimillion-dollar franchise? And more to the point: What can the rest of us learn from her story to be more daring in our own lives?

We can learn a lot.

First, we can be reminded of the value of looking at the world through fresh eyes. The legendary retailer Sam Walton once said, If everybody else is doing it one way, theres a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. Leila saw that everybody else was just selling hair products; she would sell confidence. She called her niche lipstick psychology.

Many of the best ideas fulfill a need no one else knows exists. Earle Dickson was a twenty-eight-year-old cotton buyer for Johnson & Johnson in 1920, whose wife, Josephine, kept cutting herself while cooking. To stanch the bleeding, Josephine used the standard remedy, a piece of rag attached with string. The contraptions quickly fell off. Her husband began tinkering and soon presented his wife, then his bosses with an alternative: a self-adhesive bandage with the cotton built in. Band-Aids, as they were called, failed to take off until the company gave away free samples to butchers and Boy Scouts. More than a hundred billion of Earles inventions have since been sold.

Next, we can learn that psychology plays an enormous role in tackling risk. The biggest barriers to success are not structural or cultural; they are mental and emotional. At every turn, someone (or, more likely, everyone) will call you and your idea crazy. The job of the innovator is to push past naysayers and find a way to drive forward. Leila was soft-spoken and shy. She wasnt used to bold action, confrontation, or speaking out. Before she could foster confidence in others, she first had to discover it in herself.

Finally, we can learn that risk takers rarely go it alone. Those seeking to disrupt the status quo need support. And support doesnt just mean financial, though that always helps. More often it means advice on handling fear, navigating tricky growth decisions, and breaking an intimidating task into manageable chunks. When Steve Jobs was just starting out, he sought the counsel of Robert Noyce, the coinventor of the microchip and the unofficial mayor of Silicon Valley. As with everything he did, Jobs took this relationship to an extreme. He would drop by Noyces house uninvited on his motorcycle or telephone around midnight. An exasperated Noyce finally told his wife, If he calls one more time Im just not going to pick up the phone!

But of course Noyce always picked up. Entrepreneurs always find a way.

So where did Leila go to get the backing she needed?

Thats where my story intersects with hers. In 1997 I cofounded an organization called Endeavor to support dreamers like Leila. In nearly two decades, Endeavor has screened forty thousand candidates and selected roughly one thousand individuals from more than six hundred fast-growing companies to be part of our network. We discovered these innovators in the least likely places: cyber cafs in South Africa, sandwich shops in Mexico, women-only gyms in Turkey; gamer hangouts in Indonesia; ceviche stores in the United States. Weve worked with founders in such crazily diverse fields as biometric eye scanning, snail farming, pharmacy franchising, and wind turbine manufacturing. Weve helped daring individuals operate in such challenging environments as Athens in the midst of a currency crisis, Cairo in the throes of a revolution, and Miami as it emerged out of recession.

We call these business leaders high-impact entrepreneurs, a term Endeavor coined in 2004. High-impact means individuals with the biggest ideas, the likeliest potential to build businesses that matter, and the greatest ability to inspire others. Once we invite these leaders into our network we do whatever we can to help them succeed, from forming advisory boards to accessing capital, from hiring talent to honing leadership. And we encourage them to nurture and mentor the next generation.

Today Endeavor has offices in forty-five cities around the world, employs 350 people, and has a pool of 5,000 volunteer mentors. While some of our ventures lose steam, the vast majority have grown at an impressive rate. In 2013 the entrepreneurs we support generated close to $7 billion in revenues and provided more than 400,000 jobs.

My experience has taught me that the capacity to dream big is not confined to any country, age, or gender. The desire to take initiative, be your own boss, advance your life, and improve the world is universal.