Optimism will always win.
When you become an entrepreneur, crap will start flying at you from many directions.
Most of it won’t be real. It’ll be made up, fantasized, and imagined. By YOU.
It’s true. So much of the stress comes from what we think is happening, or where we think we should be, or what we think we should be doing, or how we think we should be doing it.
Building a startup is already hard enough.
Try not to get in your own way.
Don’t get this confused, now! Being optimistic doesn’t mean that we pretend that things aren’t the way they are. If I have a pile of poop in front of me, I can’t deny that it’s poop. But optimistically, it’s not poop. It’s fertilizer.
The cynical person sees the poop, then stops at poop. They don’t go further. They see what they see, and they smell what they smell. They don’t see gardens full of flowers and vegetables that could come from that poop. They can’t grasp the idea that we can benefit from it. They don’t believe that there’s an opportunity hidden in the pile of crap.
This is why cynics lose: they miss opportunities because they don’t believe they exist.
Entrepreneurship is the art of creating opportunities for ourselves, over and over again. Only optimists can do that.
Be an optimist.
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Photo: Flickr/nvainio