This was in James Clear’s weekly 3-2-1 email newsletter:
“One type of person approaches a situation with the mindset of, “How can I make this work?”
Another type seems to approach each circumstance with the mindset of, “What are all the reasons this wouldn’t work?”
Both people will be forced to deal with reality, but the first person will only have to solve problems that actually occur while the second person will often avoid taking action entirely because of the potential problems they have dreamt up before starting.
There will always be reasons to not do something. Be a problem solver, not a problem adder.” – James Clear
It’s not just enough to have the right mindset when you have to work with someone who has the wrong mindset. You lift an idea up, and it gets knocked down. You make a suggestion and three counter examples are brought up. I believe there are times and places that this counter argument can be healthy and even promote better solutions, but when you are still looking for solutions and you have someone knocking the ideas down over and over, well then the problem or problems become unsurmountable. It’s not just your own mindset that matters, it’s the whole team’s.
I remember working on a team where this one person seemed to undermine almost everything I suggested. Even when I went to her in advance to see what the roadblocks were, she’d still undermine my meeting with new problems after I thought we’d exhausted reasons it wouldn’t work. What I didn’t understand was that this wasn’t just about being stubborn and not wanting to change, it seemed more just a mindset of “This isn’t working, and that won’t work either.”
I left that job before ever solving the mystery of how to work with this person effectively, but that experience taught me that it’s not just important to have a solution-focused mindset, it’s important that the people you work with do as well… or that you plan meetings such that ideas are allowed to be developed before there are opportunities to knock them down. Because it’s easier to knock ideas down than it is to build them up.
