Dreamers: The Risk Taker

When this surgeon decided to sell shoes, she feared regret more than failure.

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Made for Walking

After working 36-hour shifts as a resident in orthopedic surgery, Taryn Rose knew a lot about sore feet. But unlike most of her colleagues, she turned her pain into profit: Today she is CEO of Taryn Rose International, a $28 million company that makes chic, and comfortable, shoes.

A Vietnamese refugee who came to the United States when she was eight, Rose assumed she'd follow in the footsteps of her physician father. For a while, she did, getting her medical degree from USC and opting for grueling training in orthopedic surgery.

But when the time came to apply for post-residential fellowships, Rose found her heart was no longer in medicine. "I felt like a part of me, the part that loves to learn new things, that likes adventure, would be dying."

Rose had always loved shoes, especially high heels. When her fellow residents headed home after long hours on their feet, "I would make my way to Neiman Marcus for some retail therapy," she says. What if, she wondered, she gave up her career to learn how to make stylish shoes that could stand up to a day's work?

Always analytical, Rose realized the only thing stopping her was "fear of failure. I could hear my friends and family saying, 'Why did you leave a secure job?' If I failed, would I be okay facing them? And I thought, So what? I can go back to do a fellowship. I started to accept that it would be okay to say, 'I failed, but I tried.' Once I was comfortable with that scenario, the fear dissolved. I realized I feared regret more than failure. And after you embark on the path you choose, there is nothing acceptable but success."

But first, Rose had to learn the shoe business. "The great thing about a medical education is that it teaches you how to learn," she says, "because every case and every patient is different."

Rose had become friends with a salesclerk who knew people in the shoe industry in Italy. She made the introduction and headed off to Milan to learn how to make shoes.

She didn't have the money to conduct focus groups on her potential market. "My research was done sitting on the couch at Neiman Marcus, asking women what they wanted from shoes. Then I studied the demographics. Baby boomers are the largest segment of the population, they have the most money and their feet are going to hurt as they age."

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George, a career Army officer I once met, was jumpmaster for his unit and was taking a few novices up for a drop. The flight was pretty rough, and, after a while, George called off the jump because of high winds. As the plane headed back to base and the pilot pulled off an unusually smooth landing, two of the neophytes got airsick. "How come you could take that rough flight but you couldn't handle the smooth landing?" George asked.

"Well, sir," one trainee explained, "we've always jumped out of planes. We've never actually landed before."

-- Paul R. Donavin

“ If someone betrays you once, it's their fault; if they betray you twice, it's your fault. ”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

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