“The Power of Leadership”

 Why Negative Capability is Your Friend – This is the secret to turning lemons into lemonade!

More collected thoughts of Paul J. Meyer from A Fortune to Share…

I was over 50 years old before I heard the term “negative capability.” I possessed the quality personally but had never identified it by that label.  A fabulously successful Singapore businessman, Y.Y. Wong, is the first person I ever heard applying this term to the business world.

Mr. Wong, a billionaire, operates a group of companies all over Asia and has products concentrated in many areas.  Mr. Wong told me that in the context of business, negative capability is the ability to bounce back from failure by overcoming obstacles.

Mr. Wong also said that he had learned everything he knew about success from his failures.  He did this be analyzing why he had failed and then by turning the negatives of failure into positives for success.  He wasted no time in worry, doubt, or frustration over why he was facing obstacles. 

I found as we talked that Mr. Wong’s experience had closely paralleled my own.  For him and for me, achieving success has been influenced largely by the ability to ignore the negative forces in the environment and to refuse to allow them to control today’s and tomorrow’s actions.

The English poet John Keats originated the term “negative capability” and defined it as: the condition in which “individuals are capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”  Examples are everywhere of people who have used negative capability.

I have held firmly to the attitude that failure is final only if I quit trying.  Giving up after a mistake or failure steals the opportunity for success in the future.  Instead of despairing, I ask myself these questions:

Why did I fail?

What can I learn from this experience?

How can I avoid making the same mistake again?

With this approach, mistakes and failures can be transformed into stepping stones to success.

“Your job is to get over, under, around, or through every obstacle in your way!” – Paul J. Meyer

Have a great day!

Shawn

Russ M. Miller, LLIF – Chairman & CEO
Performance Institute (Human Capital Development)
Global CEO Academy (Management Training)
Sunny Hong Zhang – Managing Partner – China
Shawn M. Miller – Managing Partner – USA

P.S.  Your thoughts on our Thoughts are valuable to us and other readers, please post your comments in the Reply box…