100 Ways to Motivate Others : How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy

Be a Ruthless Optimist

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Optimistic leaders acknowledge the downside of ev-
ery situation, then focus the majority of their thinking on
the upside. They also focus the majority of their commu-
nication on the upside. They know that the downside is
always well-known throughout the team. But the upside is
never as well-known. Who wants to look like an idiotic
optimist? It is far more popular and easy to be a clever
and witty pessimist. But it is not leadership.
Optimism in the face of a grumbling and pessimistic
team takes courage and energy. It is something most team
members would never be willing to do. It is the heart and
soul of leadership. And while you may be questioned about
it now and then, in the end, the very end, when your work
is almost through, it is what your team members will love
you for the most.
96. Pay Attention
Do not hope wholly to reason away your troubles; do not feed
them with attention, and they will die imperceptibly away. Fix
your thoughts upon your business, fill your intervals with
company, and sunshine will again break in upon your mind.
—Samuel Johnson
Anything you pay attention to expands. It grows.
Pay attention to your house plants and they grow. Pay
attention to your favorite cause, and your passion and
knowledge will grow the success of that cause. Attention
is like that. Anywhere you direct it, the object of that at-
tention grows.

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When you talk to members of your team, keep paying
attention to the end results you want, not the effort to
achieve them. When you praise your managers, pay atten-
tion to results they achieved that you wanted, not the try-
ing, the effort, or the attempt to do it.
Most managers miss this vital point; they keep reward-
ing the “trying,” not realizing that doing so sends the sub-
conscious message that “trying” is always enough. Their
people soon think that if they can show they’re making
efforts, if they can show activity, then there won’t be so
much focus on end results.
Make sure you reward end results more than anything
else.
If you do so, you’ll get better end results. 
You
have to
be the one who keeps talking numbers if you want that
one person to hit his numbers.
If, instead, you commiserate with how hard everything
is, and you acknowledge how hard everyone is trying, then
that’s what you’ll get: fewer results and more trying. What-
ever you praise, grows. Always. It’s the law of the harvest.
Attention is powerful. Yet most people allow their at-
tention to be pushed and pulled around all day long by
outside forces. A chance phone call. Some annoying e-mail.
Somebody walking by their desk and asking a loaded ques-
tion. Attention gets spread too thinly this way.
But your attention is like money. It is a precious trea-
sure. It is paid in to things. We say 
pay
attention for a
reason. It is invested. It gets paid in to whatever you choose
to pay it in to. If you pay it in to the things you want (mea-
surable, numerical outcomes and specific results), you will
get more and more of what you want.
Pay Attention

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97. Create a Routine
Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which
difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.
—John Quincy Adams
Leadership success is not easy, but it is not all that
hard, either.
It is not nearly as hard as we often make it for ourselves.
The major psychological obstacle to motivational suc-
cess is the myth of permanent characteristics. It is people
who think that their habits of action are not habits, but
permanent traits. Believing in that totally false myth traps
managers in a prison, an iron web of limitation. And it’s
all unnecessary!
The repeated action patterns that you and I demon-
strate throughout the day are a result of habit, not the
result of permanent characteristics, or character defects,
or hard-wired personality traits.
If we don’t like a certain tendency someone has (let’s
say to procrastinate having that important talk with a co-
worker), then the first step in correcting the tendency is
to see it for what it is: a habit. A habit is a pattern of
behavior woven into seeming permanence by repetition.
If I repeatedly and consistently put off doing the tough
tasks in favor of the easy ones, it will become a habit. It’s
the law of the human neurological system.
So, what do we do?
All we have to do to build a new habit is to create a
routine. That’s right, a routine! Please repeat to yourself,
“I don’t need self-discipline for this, I don’t need a new

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personality, I don’t need fresh strength of character or
even more willpower.