Self-made people have the ability to recognize the possible. They see a path where others see only a wilderness.

These pathfinders are often called “people of vision.”

People flock around them as if they are gods.

DANGER 1: When enough people believe you are a god, you start to believe it yourself.

Uh-oh. 

DANGER 2: A person who is walking down a hidden pathway is often seen as a “confident, courageous and bold pioneer.” This causes onlookers to believe that confidence, courage and boldness always lead to success.

Uh-oh. Those people are in for a rude awakening when they encounter the realities of the marketplace.

DANGER 3: “People of vision” is an accurate description, but it carries a hidden danger.

To illustrate this danger, we need only to change the verbs in my two opening sentences.

Change “have” to “had” and “see” to “saw” and we more clearly see the truth: “Self-made people had the ability to recognize the possible. They saw a path where others saw only a wilderness.”

Do you see the difference? Present tense verbs cause us to believe this miraculous path-finding ability is permanent and repeatable. Changing the verbs to past tense tells us that spotting a hidden pathway is often a one-time thing, probably the result of being in the right place at the right time.

My goal today isn’t to teach you the importance of choosing the right verb tense, but to open your eyes to the dangers of fatal optimism.

Fatal optimism can be the result of

1. hypomania: irrational optimism, a reckless mixture of confidence, courage, boldness, and wishful thinking.
2. hubris: the belief that your previous successes prove you have the golden touch, and that success will follow you wherever you go.

Here are some tips that will help you avoid the massive losses of money that accompany fatal optimism:

1. The fact that a person has accumulated a lot of money doesn’t necessarily mean they could do it again. Be careful not to overvalue their advice.
2. The fact that you, personally, have accumulated a lot of money doesn’t mean that you could do it again. The touch of your finger does not turn lead into gold.
3. The ability to see hidden pathways is usually a matter of perspective. To see them, you need only to look into the wilderness from just the right angle of view.
4. Not every wilderness has a pathway to be found.
5. You do not want to die in the wilderness. 

With your permission, I will now share with you my personal pain as an ad writer:

1. Most business owners believe all their problems would go away if they had more customers. But there are problems that advertising won’t fix.
2. No business owner wants to be told that you cannot see a path through the wilderness they face. They want you to tell them that everything is going to be okay.
3. Courage, boldness, and optimism are valuable assets, but by themselves, they are not enough. You cannot have confidence until you have discovered a pathway that will take you to the other side.
4. If an ad writer accepts a client whose limitations cannot be fixed with advertising, that ad writer is setting themselves up to take the blame for a failure that was not their fault.
5. The biggest mistakes I have made in my 40 years of ad writing have been the result of allowing people to push me, beg me, or guilt me into writing ads for them after I had repeatedly told them, “I cannot see a path through this wilderness. I really don’t like our chances for success.”
6. “The risk of insult is the price of clarity.” Those are the first words of the first chapter in the first book of the Wizard of Ads trilogy I wrote 26 years ago.
7. It causes me pain to tell people that I have no solution for the problem they face, and it causes them pain to hear me say it. This is the part of my job I truly hate.

The only solace I can find is in the 3rd chapter of the book of Ecclesiastes:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance…
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak…

Roy H. Williams