[cle]

This is something I struggle with personally, because over the years I've trained my brain to look for weaknesses and reasons to say "no". It drives my wife nuts, because she sees it as being pessimistic about everything. To some extent it is, because I can very easily rattle off lists of "why that won't work" or "what's wrong with that", but it's a challenge for me to come up with lists of "why that would work".

So unsuprisingly, she's CEO of a growing and successful startup, while I still nitpick design and code reviews all day!

Personally, I try to be mindful of my kneejerk "pessimism" and skepticism, and try to balance it with optimism and acknowledging that it's a lot harder for me to identify opportunities than weaknesses.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I can very easily rattle off lists of "why that won't work" or "what's wrong with that", but it's a challenge for me to come up with lists of "why that would work"

A framework I have found to temper this instinct involves shifting from predicting whether something will or won’t work to finding the smallest, most-plausible set of assumptions which need to be true (or false) for the idea to work. You’re still identifying potential weaknesses. But instead of resolving the question around that weakness with flippant dismissal or a gut-feel guess , you’re considering how to solve it and being explicit about the boundaries between what you know, what you could learn, and what you cannot know.

[AwaAwa]

Well said. I had much the same problem, and all it took to appear more positive, was to distill the message down to "This is how it will work", rather than "This won't work no way, no how".

(I cringe inside, but my paycheck thanks me)

[namdnay]

On the plus side, if you ever move to France, you'll fit right in!