Positive Energy and Positive Results

From Jon Gordon, The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work, and Team with Positive Energy (Wiley, 2007). The line is widely reproduced in this short form; the longer passage aggregators attach to it reads: “Positive energy and positive people create positive results. There is certainly a lot of negativity in the world and choosing positive energy helps us deal with the negative people and negative situations that can knock us off course.” The wording is confirmed against the Goodreads quote page for the book; the print page has not been independently verified here.

The book is a fable. A manager named George rides a bus driven by Joy and picks up ten rules for running his team. Rule 6 gives the headline slogan its operational form: post a sign banning energy vampires from the bus, and tell the negative people on the team to contribute positively or get off. Taken with that rule, the line about positive people creating positive results is less a feel-good claim than a hiring-and-firing one. Positive results follow because you stopped tolerating the negative ones.