Be a Negative Optimist

The most important quality for success in entrepreneurship and in life is the quality of optimism. 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 temper your optimism with negativism. You must be enthusiastic about the possible upside of the investment but you must be sceptical, 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 recommends and gives 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
And he says that when his clients begin critiquing the investments they're thinking about going into, when they begin becoming negative thinkers about the investments, he says they are astonished at how bad the investments really are. He said 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 dollars in the middle of the Depression and leased a gas station that two men had gone broke running at two different occasions. And from that she built a company called Hudson Oil, which is now the biggest independent distributor of gas and oil in the United States. From a 200 dollar investment, even though everybody told her she would fail. So remember, listen to negative thinkers, but don't necessarily accept their advice.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to get these ideas into action.

• First, view your idea as if you were an outside consultant. Ask, "What are all of the possible risks or flaws in this cause of action?"
• Second, seek out the opinions of others. Listen without responding or defending. Thank them for their input. They may save you a lot of money.

Tips to Help Empower Yourself

“It’s not enough to stare up the steps – we must step up the stairs.” - Vance Havner

How hard do you really push yourself and is what you expect in return realistic? Most of the time results achieved fall in line with the exact amount of effort we are prepared to commit. We often sit and wonder why we did not achieve what we set out to do, we look for external reasons (and conveniently find them!) which give us suitable excuses for our half hearted effort. The fact is ordinary results come from ordinary effort, do you want to be ordinary or would you really like to be superb?

To achieve more you need to expect more. You need to be more demanding of yourself first, you can then follow this with higher expectations of others. We often expect more of our team members than we get, after all we pay their wages don’t we?

This rational will never work when it comes to improving results. It has to start with YOU FIRST. Your team are listening to you even though you don’t think they are, they are watching you even though you don’t think they are, and when you slip up… they will remember.

The expectation you have of you team and the results they will produce will only ever be effective in relation to the expectation you have of yourself and how you demonstrate this within your business.

Here are some tips to help you empower yourself to ‘step up the stairs’ today.

1. Set your goals and then re-set them just a little higher.
2. Be committed to constant improvement, believe that you are going to be better today than you were yesterday.
3. Practice, practice, practice, one day you WILL get it right.
4. Have a high level of expectation for yourself, this will enable you to raise the standards for everyone in your team.
5. Lead by example in every possible way.
6. Look for ways of improving your own skill set, knowledge base etc
7. Don’t just talk about it, DO IT!