The most important quality for success in entrepreneurship and in life is the quality of optimism. How optimistic are you in life? Do you often expect the best or worst to happen to you?
Optimists have an unrealistic expectation of success. As a result, they are willing to try far more things without becoming discouraged. In addition, because of their unrealistically positive attitude, they are willing to persist much longer than the average person. Optimism is a wonderful quality as long as you have it under control.
Taper Your Optimism
In order to be successful in business and in any activity where your money is involved, you must taper your optimism with negativism. You must be enthusiastic about the possible upside of the investment, but you must be skeptical, critical, suspicious, and demanding about all the different ways that your money can be lost.
Listen to Negative Viewpoints
Seek out and listen carefully to people who are negative towards your idea. Look for negative thinkers, because their viewpoints can be invaluable and save you a fortune in time and money.
I have a friend who is a lawyer. And he offers advice to many people on investments. And what he does is this. When someone comes and they want to make an investment that he’s unsure about, he says, “All right, I want you to come to my office and I want you to sit behind my desk. And then I’m going to come in and I’m going to present this investment to you and I want you to critique this investment as if you were me.”
Help Others to Evaluate Honestly
He says that when his clients begin critiquing the investments, when they begin becoming negative thinkers about the investments, he says they are astonished at how bad the investments really are. He says he has saved his clients millions of dollars by forcing them to be negative thinkers about their own ideas, simply by switching roles and sitting in front of the desk while they sit behind the desk.
Keep Your Mind Open
But don’t be overly influenced by negative thinkers. Just take their viewpoints into consideration. There’s a famous story of Mary Hudson, who started off with $200 in the middle of the Depression and leased a gas station that two men had gone broke running at two different occasions. From that she built a company called Hudson Oil, which is now the biggest independent distributor of gas and oil in the United States. It all started from a $200 investment, even though everybody told her she would fail. So remember, listen to negative thinkers, but don’t necessarily accept their advice.
Brian Tracy’s Free PDF Report Brilliant on the Basics
Learn Brian Tracy’s 7 key result areas that are guaranteed to double your sales and income in Brilliant on the Basics! All sales skills are learnable, and now you can learn what’s needed to achieve any sales goal that you set for yourself! Get your FREE report now: Click here to get it FREE!