Conlon got to the top by being more dedicated than his colleagues, he says: "I outworked all my competitors." That work ethic gave him an edge. "I competed with guys who went to the Ivy League schools and they went to Harvard and Yale and Wharton," he says, "but they wanted to go home earlier in the evening."

When they went home, Conlon kept at it. "I got an extra day's work done that night, so I was a day ahead of them the next week and two days the following week," he says.

The real estate mogul argues that this fear-based passion is special to entrepreneurs who have experienced difficulty: "I think a lot of people you will talk to who immigrated or came from, as they say, the other side of the tracks, are driven by fear."