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Sixty-odd years ago a young insurance salesman in Minneapolis named Larry Wilson was miserable. Every time he was rejected by a prospective customer he felt like a terrible failure, an anxious loser unwilling to make the next telephone call. You might say he had a fixed mindset: Why bother to make a call if he was only going to fail again? He was ready to quit his job. But then his boss taught him a simple trick: he could change how he thought about those rejections. Because it took a beginning salesperson about twenty calls before making one sale and the average commission was $500, that meant on average a call was worth $25. Now, whenever Larry was told no, he forced himself to cheerfully think, “Thanks for the twenty-five dollars.” This simple change not only made him feel better, it also allowed him to do his job better because he could focus on customers instead of on how miserable he felt. Soon, he was averaging ten calls for each commission of $1,000, and whenever he was rejected, he would think, “Thanks for the one hundred dollars.” Essentially, he had reframed his thinking about failure.
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Amy C. Edmondson (Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well)