Caution does not spread

It might be that everyone is out there waiting for you to come out with the new feature. Perhaps your detractors are just waiting for you to trip and your competitors can’t wait to see the sneak peek of your new product. Somebody for sure has also set an alert to track everything that you are doing and beat you to it.

Or maybe not.

The point is that the time you spend worrying about all these unlikely scenarios – let’s accept it, in most cases we are not that important – is time you could invest to put your work out there and get people excited about it.

Caution does not spread.

Winning mentality

When we lose, it’s easy to play down the whole situation.

It was not so important after all.

Others were lucky.

That single decision was unfair and really cut my chances.

I did not give my best, but if I would have..

The context was heavily against me.

It’s a defence mechanism that puts space between us and the failure so that we don’t feel like such. And it tells of a tendency to see loss as failure.

Of course, if we want to avoid losing more in the future, we’d be better off by owning the loss and trying to see what went wrong. What it is that is under our control and that we can do better.

That’s the sign of a winning mentality.

Opening up

The only way to get people to share their ideas, their thoughts, their feelings, their problems, their feedback, is for you to shut up.

If you keep talking, they will stop thinking. If you interrupt them, they will give up trying. If you go first – particularly if you are in a position of power – they will just repeat what you said.

To get people to open up you have to willing to give them space and just listen.

Ideas fly away

No matter how fantastic an idea is, how relevant it is, how sure you are you are never going to forget it and you will keep improving on it.

In the busyness of the day, the idea will most likely fly away.

If you ever want to achieve something meaningful (for you), take the habit of writing things down.

It makes a difference.

Confidence

You don’t always have an answer, you don’t always know what to do, you don’t always understand what is happening.

The trick is not to try to fake it. Not to try to escape it.

If you can just stay with the feeling for a while, what you need will come.

Confidence is about being at ease with uncertainty, without wanting to get rid of it at all costs.