I have a great colleague. Wonderful guy. Making 700 euro gross per month. Having a family with a couple of kids.

You can imagine that it is hard to come around from 700 euro. And his wife only has a part-time job.

Let’s triple your salary

Because of his challenging financial situation I was looking for a possibility to increase his salary. I found a great opportunity in the form of a new business line which he could execute and manage. I was very excited to share this with him and when we had the chance to sit together I gave him the great news. At least, I thought I was giving him great news.

His reaction was totally unexpected. He started to give all kinds of reasons why this new project will not work. Why he can’t do it.

I explained him that the project is OK, that I will fully support it and that we will help him all the way.

He still was rejecting the project due to all the problems he imagined and these problems could not be overcome according to him.

I tried to explain him the difference between successful and unsuccessful people. I said that both successful people as unsuccessful people meet with the same obstacles and set-backs. They are living in the same world, right? The reason that successful people are successful is that they regard obstacles and set-backs as ordinary events which need a solution and they go for the solution. Unsuccessful people, meeting the same obstacles and set-backs regard these as insurmountable and they don’t see solutions.

I asked him to discuss it with his wife and to ask her is she would like it if he would triple his salary, and I asked him to ask the same question to his children…if they would like to go on holiday to a nice country. His wife loved the idea. She told him to go for it.

The next day we sat together and….he even had more problems and impossibilities.

In the meantime me and some other colleagues decided to start with this project, with or without our friend, as we see a lot of opportunity.

What a negative mind-set can do with a person. And you know what the sad thing is? A negative mind-set is always right. Because a negative mind-set will always ignore the opportunities in life and because it refuses all opportunities, it lives constantly in misery and the misery of the person’s (financial) situation fuels the negative mind-set as it finds constantly proof that life is bad to him….

A positive mind-set is as easy to have as a negative mind-set. It is a matter of choice.