For many businesses, in these pre-Labor Day workdays and the unofficial “End of Summer” things slow painfully down.
Projects and deals take twice as long and sometimes feel twice as hard.
This year, compounding the challenge has been the rollicking Market Gyrations of these past few weeks, amplified by "The Sky is Falling" financial and political media blaring forebodings of doom and demise.
So how does our ambitious and goal-oriented executive block out the negative noise and focus on the Mission Critical Business Tasks and Projects at hand?
How does he or she be cognizant of / sensitive to current events, while remaining ever undistracted and undeterred by them?
Well, the most Effective Executives I know do this: They reframe everything as an opportunity, and everything as a positive.
Markets going up? These are boom times so let’s get on the bus and go for the ride.
Markets going down? What a buying opportunity! If I liked it at 50, I love it at 30!
Summer doldrums: As a buyer, a great time to press sellers for discounts. As a seller, with my competition loafing on the beach, I make hay.
Now, this can’t just be Hot Air / Pollyanna Self-Talk.
No, it has to be real and serious and buttressed by what famed Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight calls in his best-selling book The Power of Negative Thinking.
In it, Coach Knight makes the simple but powerful point that in any competitive pursuit, everyone wants to win, so just thinking positively about it rarely yields competitive advantage.
Far more relevant is the willingness to sacrifice to Prepare to Win: to learn how to stop making the mistakes that losers make in abundance and that winners have trained themselves through hard work to avoid.
For athletes, this means practice, practice, practice to stop Missing Free Throws, or Three Foot Putts, or Second Serves, or The Cutoff Man.
For business people, this means the daily discipline to prepare for meetings, to start critical projects far before their due date, and consistently doing the Quantitative and Data Analysis to determine what is actually working in our business versus going by gut and feel.
Combine these two philosophies, the Power of Positive Thinking and of everyone and everything no matter what being good and an opportunity...
...With the Power of Negative Thinking and the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, on a career basis of making of the sacrifices and of taking the time to do things right.
Of such combined mindsets and disciplines are legends and fortunes made.
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The Power of Negative Thinking (Squared)
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