I find the advise useful for certain situations. For example, hesitation is contacting a prospective customer for fear of rejection. But this has the potential

I find the advise useful for certain situations. For example, hesitation is contacting a prospective customer for fear of rejection. But this has the potential to lead down the path of mediocrity if applied in a company. Just one more lost customer, just another half an hour of down time, just another customer support call missed. They pile on. The key is to know your core values as a company and be paranoid about them. If your USP is amazing customer service, you should feel like the world ending if one support call is missed. However you may not worry about occasional downtime of half an hour. The situation would be opposite if you offer an infrastructure service and your outage affects your customers' business. The paranoia in these cases is not rational but that element of irrationality is your edge.