“You Can’t Do It” is Powerful Motivation | Hacker News Reader

“You Can’t Do It” is Powerful Motivation

randfishkin.com

53 pointsatularora9 comments

He needs to turn this into a positive narrative. The Germans have an aphorism: "Stubbornness is the energy of fools." He should reframe this as a persevering focus on his prospect's needs. Sam Walton suggested an approach Rand might consider in his ten rules for building a successful business:

   Rule 10: Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. 
   If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find 
   your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for 
   a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you’re headed the wrong way. 
   I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town 
   of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

I blogged about this in http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/02/01/focus-on-your-prospe...

It's still good to be able to recognize when you're trying to swim up a waterfall rather than just upstream though.

My dad said something similar when I was starting out. He apologizes for it at least once a year. (I totally don't hold it against him, don't worry.)

While I generally don't let People Are Wrong On The Internet get to me, I have one exception: I am by nature a curmudgeon and keep a list in a notebook of predictions along the lines of "You will never sell X of this software." It is eleven lines long at the moment, and has eight smiley face stickers.

I think I'm getting another sticker for Christmas.

Quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs, just for the honesty and openness Rand writes with.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-we-believe-why-seomozs-tagfe...

Rand's style there piles over into his SEOMoz philosophies, which, not surprisingly, he's also pretty open about.

I've got a rule that "If it's not impossible, it's not worth doing." If most people think that what you're doing is impossible, you've got less competition.

Or, sometimes, it makes things worse.

But then again that all depends on the person, and their own personal outlook.

"Now my body says, 'You can't do this boy' But my pride says, 'Oh, yes you can'."

-- Toby Keith, As Good As I Once Was. 2005.

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