The most important
quality for
success in
entrepreneurship and in
life is the quality of optimism.
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BE MAD
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
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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.
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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
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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.
>>>
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Creative Dissatisfaction
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8 Key Entrepreneurial Questions
Listen to Negative
Viewpoints
Seek out and listen
carefully to people who are negative toward 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 gives advice to many people
on investments. And he does something very unique.
When clients want
to make an investment that they're unsure about, he asks them come to his office
and sit behind his desk. And then he presents the investment to them and asks
them to critique the investment as though they were he.
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Venture Financing Funnel
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Venture Financing:
Key Documents
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.
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Amazing
Thinker 360
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.
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 investment, even
though everybody told her she would fail. So remember,
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listen to negative
thinkers, but don't necessarily accept their advice.
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