During lunch I was going through my RSS feeds when I came across a blog post by Jason Calacanis. In case you don’t know him, Jason is a US-based serial entrepreneur and A-list blogger. I have been reading his blog for the past two years or so. Today Jason had an interesting quote on his blog, that I fully agree to:

I’m amazed at how pessimistic the average person is. I’ve come to realize in my career is that the difference between people who gets things done and those who do not is this pessimism. I’ve always been attracted to the folks who say “what if we could…” or “what if you.” When I hear people talk like that I get engaged. When I hear “that’s been done already….” and “that will never work…” I want to walk away from the conversation.
(Emphasis added by me)

I recognize exactly what he says, I also hate it when people only look at the negative side of things. And it’s the main reason why most people can never successfully run a business, either their own or someone else’s. Without new ideas and products a company cannot outperform the competition. In the blogosphere pessimism seems to be even worse. If I look at the negativism in blog comments at some of the business blogs I subscribe to, I am not sure whether I should laugh or be sad. Initially I often feel sad for the people who have such a negative mindset, but when thinking it through it’s probably a good thing. Not everybody should be an entrepreneur, and hopefully they will one day join the competition.

It actually fits to the blog post I wrote earlier today about the problems I had to solve at work. If you are a pessimist you might give up, only the optimists continue and succeed. And I probably would not have been in China in the first place, had I been a pessimist.