How hard do you work at something when you don’t know it’s not possible? The following story illustrates how lack of negative beliefs result in success.

Ever heard of the Franklin Mint? If you haven’t, you’ve never received any mail!

The man who started the Franklin Mint, Joseph Segel,  had an idea to make commemorative, oversize coins.  He got the idea after seeing the British Government Mint oversized coins.  If they could do it, so could he.

He hired a retired engineer from the U.S. Mint.  Together, they worked up a design for the first coin in the series. The retired engineer created the dies for the coins, based on his experience making U.S. coins. Of course, no coins in the U.S. inventory were as large as the ones the Franklin Mint wanted to produce.

Production was started but the dies became unusable  after just a few coins were produced.  This wasn’t right. The dies took time and money  to make. The engineer didn’t know what the problem was since he’d never worked with dies that large. However, knowing that the British Royal Mint had created these large coins for a long time, he knew there had to be an answer.

Time after time, the dies tore up. But slowly, new ideas improved the dies and the yields began to rise. With effort and innovation, the dies were improved to the point that the yield was very high before the dies had to be replaced.

Word of this got around and one day, the Franklin Mint had a group of visitors. They were from the British Mint. They wanted to know how the Franklin Mint got such a high yield from their dies because theirs tore up just like the first set created by the Franklin Mint.  They had never gotten the yield beyond what the original Franklin Mint dies produced.

In other words, the Franklin Mint did the impossible!

Years afterwards, Mr. Segel said that if he had know the British Mint had not solved the yield problem, he would have given up rather than spending the time and money to develop the better dies. Not knowing it “couldn’t” be done, allowed it to BE DONE!

What limiting beliefs are holding you back?