A short motivational talk by Brian Tracy arguing that optimism is the single most important trait for success in sales, entrepreneurship, and life. He recommends pairing strong, even ‘unrealistic’, optimism with disciplined skepticism—seeking negative viewpoints and role‑reversals to uncover risks—illustrated by an anecdote about Mary Hudson building Hudson Oil from $200.
The most important quality for success in sales or entrepreneurship and in life is the quality of optimism. So how optimistic are you in your life? Do you often expect the best or the worst to happen to you? This determines your attitude and everything that happens. You see, optimists have an unrealistic expectation of success. As a result, they're willing to try far more things without becoming discouraged. In addition, because of their unrealistically positive attitude, they're willing to persist much longer than the average person. Optimism is a wonderful quality as long as you have it under control. 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 positive upside of the investment, but you must be skeptical and critical and suspicious and demanding about all the different ways that your money can be lost. Seek out and listen carefully to people who are negative towards your idea. Look for negative thinkers because their viewpoints can be invaluable and often save you a fortune in time and money. I have a friend who's a lawyer and he recommends and gives advice to many people on investments. And what he does is this. When someone comes in and they want to make an investment that he's unsure about, he says, alright, 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. And he says that when his clients begin critiquing the investments that they're thinking about getting into, when they begin becoming negative thinkers about the investments, he says they're astonished at how bad the investments really are. In many cases, 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. 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, listen to negative thinkers, but don't necessarily accept their advice. Thank you for viewing this video on how to become a negative optimist. For business success. If you enjoyed this video, please press the like button below and and click on the link on the screen to subscribe to my channel.
