Exceptional leaders have an internal belief that reinforces their confidence in their own ability to accomplish what they set out to do. To others, it looks like audacity. But for them, it’s a voice in their heads that keeps saying: Maybe I can do this. Maybe if I change strategies, push harder, what will stop this from happening, and how can I go around it? They build patterns of positive maybes and what-ifs in their minds, paving a thought process their minds are bound to follow. They are as unsure as anyone gets, but they question every doubt and every failure: Who do I hire? What’s the worst that can happen? Why did this fail? What can be done? What am I not seeing yet? What must I let go of? How do I develop myself to conquer this? How should I view this? Why don’t I try and see? This tiny voice is what goes against majority thinking, the thinking that sets people on the most-walked paths because those paths feel safe, familiar, convenient, or are simply the paths of least resistance. This reinforcing mental action drives their thinking, and their thinking drives their outcomes.
Two distinct mindsets stay locked in a loop, with the same outcomes resulting from them: one of growth and evolution, and the other of redundancy and stagnation. For example, when you keep holding off on an idea you know could change the trajectory of your company because it doesn’t seem logical, because no one else is doing this thing that seems so obvious to you, but to no one else, that is succumbing to majority thinking. Or perhaps there is a simple but profound idea waiting to be put to good use, but you don’t act on it because nobody else does it. You think, Surely, if it was this obvious and potentially effective, someone else should have jumped on it already. And because it doesn’t fit the normal, proven route, which probably works too, you stay on the familiar road that already works.
Everyone likes to stick to what’s already working, and no one wants to fix what isn’t broken. But what if what’s between you and a better version of what you’re building is that chisel to carve out something new, or maybe not even new, but necessary for you? So, the next time your wiring pushes you to think, I can’t do this, think instead: Maybe, just maybe, this thing will work when I do it. Because the truth is, it probably will. Interrupt the majority thinking with a “maybe”. That “maybe” might just change everything.
