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Why being an optimist and having a positive mindset is important in business? Tim Draper, the legendary Silicon Valley VC investor, told Rafael Badziag (writer of ‘The Billion Dollar Secret: 20 Principles of Billionaire Wealth and Success’): “You have a choice. You can be an optimist or you can be a pessimist. Optimists are the ones who accomplish everything. Pessimists don’t accomplish anything. Pessimists just give you all the reasons why it’s not going to work. The optimists show pessimists that ‘Hey, every once in a while, guys, you’re wrong. This might work.’ So, be an optimist.”
Billionaires don’t spend time on negativity. Tony Tan Caktiong, a billionaire & the World Entrepreneur of the Year 2004, is quite extreme about it. He can’t really remember sad or painful things. “Maybe the reason why I don’t remember is that I have a very positive mindset. I always look at the positive side of things” All the self-made billionaires describe themselves as enthusiastic optimists, as positive-thinking people and they see it as their strength. They believe that hard times never last forever. They feel positive not only about themselves but also about other people.
Have Faith
Mohed Altrad, a French-Syrian billionaire businessman, has always had unbounded faith in his future. It was the case when he rejected his destiny as a shepherd. It was the case when he moved to France. And it was the case when his seemingly blind optimism helped him to get into the right business. After selling his portable computer company, he stumbled upon a bankrupted scaffolding company in his wife’s village:
I was on vacation there and somebody came and said, “Do you want to buy a scaffolding company?” And believe me, this was the first time I’d heard the word scaffolding. Maybe you could say it’s irrational the way I did it, but I believed in it. So I invested all the money I had in this business. I just went to see the company, and although it was bankrupted, I saw in it a huge development potential because scaffolding is needed all over the world. If you want to paint your ceiling, you need a scaffold. If you want to renovate the outside of your house, it’s a scaffold. If you want to work at refineries, nuclear centers, airports, you need this. I saw an opportunity and I saw a way of being close to my wife, to her village. You ask yourself, am I in the right place and doing the right thing? This is the sort of feeling.
In the next 30 years, Mohed Altrad not only turned this company around but added over 200 other scaffolding companies to his Altrad Group, making it world’s number one scaffolding company. This earned him the title of World Entrepreneur of the Year 2015. Billionaire told Rafael Badziag the most valuable advice in his life was: “Believe. You should have some faith in what you are doing.”
This youthful enthusiasm and sometimes even ignorance help you in achieving great things, because you don’t know that it can’t work or you don’t realize how hard it’s going to be, and you make it happen. Jack Cowin, a Canadian-Australian businessman and entrepreneur, has similar thoughts when he looks back on his career:
One of the interesting things about youth is you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s youthful enthusiasm of we’re climbing the mountain and we don’t know how high it is. Heads up in the clouds, but it’s an adventure. You don’t know what the limitations are. If I knew then all the things I know now, we wouldn’t have done half the things. Because we made a lot of mistakes. Expanded geographically way too soon. But we survived. We were at the front end. Today you’d have competitors who’d put you out of business. We didn’t know anything. But you survive, you make it work.
Jack, being a Canadian, came to Australia with the desire to bring fast, affordable food to this country. His first business was a KFC store, and then he built Hungry Jack’s and Domino’s Pizza there and became a billionaire during that process.
This faith and unbounded optimism are visible in billionaires’ biographies and attitude. You can see it when Frank Stronach came to America with $200 in his pocket and the faith to make it big here, or you can see it in billionaires’ statements, like Ron Sim’s. When Rafael Badziag asked him what had been his greatest success, he answered: “I would say the next 10, 15 years, we will see our real winners. I will candidly say that I am far from my goal. The greatest things are yet to come.”
Anything Is Possible
To say this is nearly conventional, “Limits are only inside you.” Everybody considers himself as having no limits. But in reality, most of us deal with huge mental limitations on a daily basis without being aware of it. Dilip Shanghvi, the world’s wealthiest man in pharmaceuticals, told Rafael Badziag, “All of us are capable of far more than what we think we are. We have so much inherent potential. So believe in yourself.”
Sergey Galitskiy founded Magnit, the largest supermarket chain in Europe with now over 17,000 supermarkets and drugstores. When Rafael Badziag was interviewing him, they were opening five new stores every day. Can you imagine it? Imagine what is needed to open a supermarket. First you need to find land, then to negotiate and buy it, then you need to get all the permissions, then build the store, then install all the systems, hire and train people, organize supply and logistics, then actually supply it and market it to the customers, then you can open it. And they do it five times each and every day? How is it possible?
“The successful entrepreneurial life is in fact the denial that this or another thing is impossible. Each of partners would say that it is impossible to open five stores per day and I would say the same, but when you are in this mode, every day why not more, why not more. The fact that a company like this was set up in impossibly hard conditions and became successful is already the denial of everybody’s thoughts at that time, and some people did think that it was not impossible.”
(Excerpt is from ‘The Billion Dollar Secret: 20 Principles of Billionaire Wealth and Success’ by Rafael Badziag).
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