I never enjoyed listening to people who bounce along on "attitude" intentionally blind to real things. You can't just imagine your way around obstacles. If you don't have the skills, can't acquire them or don't think there will be ugly patches and times that require tough decision making (at least good guesses and the willingness to push), then your attitude is just an annoying deception.
However, when you accept that risk is a necessary part of reward and you decide that now is the time to take a leap, mustering up the confidence and determination has to include commitment. You can't be blind and stupid, but the right approach does have to come with attitude.
Even if you quake with fear, keep it to yourself. Your effectiveness as a leader (winner of others confidence and effectiveness) depends on it.
This comment from Godin is spot-on. He writes:
All the evidence I've seen shows that positive thinking and confidence improves performance. In anything.
Give someone an easy math problem, watch them get it right and then they'll do better on the ensuing standardized test than someone who just failed a difficult practice test.
No, positive thinking doesn't allow you to do anything, but it's been shown over and over again that it improves performance over negative thinking.
Key question then: why do smart people engage in negative thinking? Are they actually stupid?
The reason, I think, is that negative thinking feels good. In its own way, we believe that negative thinking works. Negative thinking feels realistic, or soothes our pain, or eases our embarrassment. Negative thinking protects us and lowers expectations.
In many ways, negative thinking is a lot more fun than positive thinking. So we do it.
If positive thinking was easy, we'd do it all the time. Compounding this difficulty is our belief that the easy thing (negative thinking) is actually appropriate, it actually works for us. The data is irrelevant. We're the exception, so we say.
Positive thinking is hard. Worth it, though.
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