Optimism, pessimism, and why you should participate online

I’m not usually a motivational 1-liner sort of guy. But this one from Uwe’s Blog hit home with me. It’s the difference between success and failure:

Losers visualize the penalties of failure. Winners visualize the rewards of success.

It resonates personally because I’m the kind of person who can see 100 possible outcomes, each worse than the one before — and within 5 minutes convince myself I will be homeless and alone by next Tuesday. But I think this 1-liner also explains why so many people are failing to take advantage of the online space for their business or organization.

When something new comes along, most of us tend to believe the worst. That’s true whether we’re talking about airplanes or computers or online media. We’re unable to visualize the rewards of success because we don’t have the experience to do that. We don’t have any grasp on how jumping into an online conversation with people will improve the work we do. Only after doing it can we really understand just how work- and life-changing it is.

But it’s pretty easy to visualize the penalties of failure. We’ll get overwhelmed by extra work. We’ll say something silly on a blog and embarrass ourselves. People will leave mean comments or otherwise undermine the goals we’re working for.

Here’s the secret to this — the negatives almost never happen. And when they do, they’re not a catastrophe — they’re no different than the bad things that happen to you in your everyday work life already. But the positives — those things you can’t even imagine yet — they happen all the time for people who simply make a commitment to participate in this online space. And with patience, those positives start spinning at them faster and faster, so that they can’t imagine having done their work without that resource.

And one more thing. Those people and organizations who are successful in the online space — who have thriving blogs or podcasts, or who use social networks to help their work – they are not any different from you in talent or time or personality. The difference is that they’ve jumped in when the negatives seemed daunting, trusting that the positives would follow.