Organizations need optimistic people and people with a pessimistic outlook. The key to career success is finding a role where you use your superpowers to contribute to organizational success. When you express your concerns about the future, people often admonish you to look on the bright side and to find the positive aspect. Moreover, pessimism can be debilitating, particularly if you become so convinced that you cannot succeed at some venture that you stop trying.
However, your ability to see the negative side is valuable for you if you use it right. Top performers in a specific role share a standard set of 20 to 25 performance traits. About five of these traits discriminate the top performers from good performers. When your superpowers align to the role — you are far more likely to achieve career success and satisfaction.
If having a pessimistic outlook is one of your superpowers, here is how to use it for career success and satisfaction.
You Are Better Prepared with a Pessimistic Outlook
When planning for the future (i.e., strategy, project, product, process, campaign, career, etc.), it is critical to figure out what is going to go wrong before dreadful things happen. By being more aware, of the obstacles that may appear as you execute your plan, the more advanced thinking you can put in to mitigate or avoid them. These insights enable you to enlist the support of others to help you deal with the potential issues and problems ahead of time.
If you start a plan by convincing yourself that it must succeed, then you must improvise as each problem occurs. Sometimes, you may achieve success under pressure. However, those obstacles create delays—some of the challenges may kill the project. None of these outcomes, build your reputation as a high performer.
Your inner pessimist superpower is always trying to find reasons why a plan will fail. It is best if you do not silence it. Have the courage to use your inner voice to identify the factors that must be dealt with before you get started. Management sees success as completing projects on time and budget. Allowing time and resources to deal with the things that will go wrong makes you a great planner. While organizations do not like giving the extra time and money to the project — they may even not go ahead. However, knowing upfront is always better than asking for more time and money later. You will thank your inner pessimist later for its role in the success of the project and your career success.
Project success is rooted in a combination of skillfully managing people, processes, technologies, and developing a mitigation strategy for when things go wrong. This perspective may appear obvious, but the experience and wisdom needed to make projects successful are often not so common.
Top Ten Causes of Project Failure
Industry analysts have published statistics showing that as many as 60-80% of IT-led projects continue to fail. According to The Standish Group,
- 32 percent of all projects are a success
- 44 percent are “challenges” because they were late, over budget and had fewer features and functions than required
- 24 percent are “failures” — cancelled before completion, or they were delivered but not used
The top causes that lie behind these dismal statistics read like a list of common-sense “do’s and don’ts.” With your pessimistic outlook, how many of these could you have named before starting the project?
- Inadequate communication
- Poor plans and planning processes
- Inadequate identification, documentation, and tracking requirements
- Project managers who are inadequately trained or inexperienced
- Lack of resources
- Technology illiteracy
- Unsatisfactory budget management
- Insufficient quality control
- Lack of sound executive sponsorship
- Underestimating or ignoring the impact of change
Since these things are all common sense, why do so many projects fail because of them? Some suggest that complex projects, involving multiple technologies, can be challenging to complete successfully, which is why IT failure still is a significant issue.
In the late 1990s, at Scarborough Utilities, we moved to a suite of Oracle solutions. The implementation was a disaster. As the deadline was approaching, I remove the external project team after going over their detail project plan. The last step in the program was “magic happens.” Fortunately, I recruited Jim Harcourt to get us back on track. Jim is a realist, pragmatic, has a pessimistic outlook — he is the best project manager that I know. Jim’s recovery plan got us back on track and implemented a great solution.
A Pessimistic Outlook Can Motivate You to Do Better
"The solution isn't to do away with dreaming and positive thinking. Rather, it's making the most of our fantasies by brushing them up against the very thing most of us are taught to ignore or diminish: the obstacles that stand in our way." — Gabriele Oettingen
Gabriele Oettingen’s research focuses on how people think about the future, and how this affects cognition, emotion, and behaviour. She has done splendid work showing that when you compare the present with some more desirable future — one that has fewer problems — you create energy to narrow that gap.
Use your pessimistic tendencies to help you find ways that the world could be better. It is tempting to wallow in all things that could be improved. You may wish you had lived in “the good old days” when things were better. However, there are aspects of your world that you can improve. See the issues that your insights and efforts could fix as opportunities.
You can use that energy to meet with other people to make progress fixing a problem you have seen. It works equally well with your projects or your development plan. It means that you are looking for issues that you think your insights and efforts can influence. In other words, the gaps between present and future reality are most likely to drive action. These actions are the ones you bridge through your efforts.
A Pessimistic Outlook Sets You Up for Fulfillment
Do you engage in defensive pessimism? You assume that the road ahead of you is steep and that you are unlikely to succeed. In the worst case, having low expectations for the future sets you up for fulfillment later.
When you have concerns that you have not yet done a good enough job, you create anxiety. Moreover, by focusing on adverse outcomes, you will work longer and harder on a task than you would if you were confident about the result. Furthermore, your extra effort is increasing your chance of success.
Also, setting lower expectations for the future creates opportunities to be pleasantly surprised. You may experience,
- a client being more satisfied with a project than you expected
- customers order more than you thought they would
- an audience is more impressed with your talk than you anticipated
- your boss providing positive feedback
- you are asked to lead a larger project
These pleasant surprises are a nice reward for a job well done. Fulfillment drives us to do more than what people expect of us. Satisfaction of a job well done is an internal measure of being fulfilled. It is far more likely to occur when we are using our superpowers. Having others recognize our work is just the icing on the cake. So, choose to use your defensive pessimism to help you succeed at hard tasks. When you do, you are helping yourself to enjoy it more when you do.
Concluding Thoughts
We all have unique superpowers. Generally, people do not discover their high-performance traits unless they stumble across them or they see the dominant attributes as a negative — pessimistic outlook. Fulfillment comes from entirely using our talent stack — skills, knowledge, wisdom, performance traits, and accomplishments to do something worthwhile. Think of your unique talent stack as your career capital. We all like to maximize our return on capital, within our risk profile.
Discovering your micro-motives can help you to find your superpowers.
In every role, top performers share a standard set of 20 to 25 performance traits. We predict your success and satisfaction for more 500 high-performance benchmarks. We identify your high-performance traits and find the best-fit roles that need your superpowers and align with your career interests.
Insights About High-Performance Traits To Advance Your Career
We are incredibly passionate about high-performance analytics and the impact this scientific insight can have on you. Using SuccessFinder, you can discover your unique strengths and challenges. Using our vast database of high-performance benchmarks, we find the best-fit roles. We provide a predictor of your success and satisfaction in these roles, along with the insights of specific areas to develop to improve performance.
In every role, top performers share a standard set of 20 to 25 performance traits. We predict your success and satisfaction for more 500 high-performance benchmarks.
We show you how to leverage your unique talents to achieve career satisfaction and success. Focus on your strengths and manage your challenges. You complete the assessment online, we then provide you report, four hours of professional feedback via video call, and you have access to our online journey to help you with your development. You gain insights regarding,
- your “superpowers” — the traits you have that are much higher than average
- how your performance traits match with high performers in a given role, this includes where you are both higher and lower than the top performers
- how your unique set of traits matches with various positions to provide you with best-fit insights
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