Maximizing Performance Through Applied Common Sense*

Do you ever notice the way people very often forecast failure. They will say things like, “this may be a stupid question” or “you probably won’t like this” or “this may sound kind of dumb.” Do you ever notice that people do that? You might do that. You might actually advertise or forecast failure. You may actually encourage people to think that your question is about to be stupid. Do you ever notice when you do that, you say, “this may be a stupid question” and people think, yep, right on schedule, a stupid question. So what do you do instead? What you do is you actually forecast success. You say, “This may be interesting” or “this may be worth considering” or “I encourage you to consider this.” If you forecast success instead of failure you will get by far better results.