Paranoia, Evolution, and Business…

Cover via Amazon

When people ask me how my business is faring, I answer that “no matter what, I feel paranoid.”

“If I win a deal, I worry that I might get too confident and lose my edge.

If I lose a deal, I worry that it’s the beginning of the end.

I’m just constantly paranoid.”

For a while, my guiding light was a book by former Intel CEO, Andy Grove, called Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company, but my new favorite book: Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters also offers the same advice, though based on data and evolutionary psychology.

As they write, “evolutionary speaking, it's good to be paranoid because it might save your life.”

I feel much better now.

Wait!! Who’s that behind you?

Chutzpah Intelligence

During my most recent sauna visit, I met a retired professor of Psychology who told me that there are over 200 different types of intelligence that have been identified.

He lamented the fact that we devote most of our energies to IQ (with a little of EQ-Emotional and the very rare AQ-Adversity).

When it comes to sales, there's an old saying, "if you don't ask, you never get," and I wondered if there's a "Chutzpah Quotient."

There probably is and you probably know those people.

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