josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart [LWN.net]

josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart

Posted May 8, 2011 22:37 UTC (Sun) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942)
In reply to: josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart by cmccabe
Parent article: Scale Fail (part 1)

> Ironically, optimism-- or at any rate, the will to keep on going-- is one of the best predictors I know of success-- and not just in business.

This is not what I have observed. The most successful in business people I know personally are pessimists. In one particular case the pessimism made the guy to prepare for the worst. That allowed for him to survive bad times and gain from the good times disproportionally.

Another example is a very optimistic guy who quieted his job as an oil engineer and went to Thailand to start a shrimp farm. It was rather successful initially. But one day a drunken worker from the factory got into a conflict with local mobs and they burn the farm down... Now the guy is back into his engineering position.

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josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart

Posted May 9, 2011 16:08 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

Are you sure you aren't arguing against your point? In the examples you gave you have one person who is successful because they had the will to keep going and were prepared, which you call pessimism and one where the person was not successful when they quit after the first setback which you call optimistic.

Success is just like cancer, you can get (un)lucky but if you keep hitting those carcinogens you improve your chances of catching it, although not guaranteed either way.

josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart

Posted May 9, 2011 21:19 UTC (Mon) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

> successful because they had the will to keep going

In the first case it was not the will but rather the cash that the company saved during the good times under assumption that those would not last. With that it was not problematic to carry on during the bad times. And when competitors that hired too many engineers as consultants for the oil industry went burst it was trivial to pick up their clients. (In Norway it is rather hard to fire a person on a permanent position so a bankruptcy often is the simplest solution for a small company.)

> the person was not successful when they quit after the first setback

Only a very optimistic person would invest a few years of savings into something he had only vague idea about. And that fire on the shrimp farm was not a setback, it was a total disaster. As far as I know the farm was not insured against that type of damaged and the guy simply had no money to try one more time.

Note that I am not arguing that pessimism is required for a business success. I just want to say that even if optimism could be a necessary trait for some kinds of entrepreneurship, it may lead to failure just as well as to success.