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June 30 - October 20, 2018
becoming an optimist consists not of learning to be more selfish and self-assertive, and to present yourself to others in overbearing ways, but simply of learning a set of skills about how to talk to yourself when you suffer a personal defeat. You will learn to speak to yourself about your setbacks from a more encouraging viewpoint.
On the other hand, there are times not to use these techniques.
So rare to find someone frankly speaking that optimism is not suitable in some situations. what follows is damn right!
The fundamental guideline for not deploying optimism is to ask what the cost of failure is in the particular situation. If the cost of failure is high, optimism is the wrong strategy.
On the other hand, if the cost of failure is low, use optimism.
The beliefs are the direct causes of what we feel and what we do next. They can spell the difference between dejection and giving up, on the one hand, and well-being and constructive action on the other.
What you will see is that pessimistic explanations set off passivity and dejection, whereas optimistic explanations energize.
The next step follows immediately: If you change the habitual beliefs that follow adversity for you, your reaction to adversity will change in lockstep.
THERE ARE TWO general ways for you to deal with your pessimistic beliefs once you are aware of them. The first is simply to distract yourself when they occur—try to think of something else. The second is to dispute them. Disputing is more effective in the long run, because successfully disputed beliefs are less likely to recur when the same situation presents itself again.
We can more or less easily distance ourselves from the unfounded accusations of others. But we are much worse at distancing ourselves from the accusations that we launch—daily—at ourselves.
What we say to ourselves when we face a setback can be just as baseless as the ravings of a jealous rival. Our reflexive explanations are usually distortions. They are mere bad habits of thought produced by unpleasant experiences in the past—by childhood conflicts, by strict parents, by an overly critical Little League coach, by a big sister’s jealousy. But because they seem to issue from ourselves, we treat them as gospel.
Much of the time you will have facts on your side, since pessimistic reactions to adversity are so often overreactions.
Positive thinking often involves trying to believe upbeat statements such as “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” in the absence of evidence, or even in the face of contrary evidence. If you can actually believe such statements, more power to you. Many educated people, trained in skeptical thinking, cannot manage this kind of boosterism. Learned optimism, in contrast, is about accuracy.
We have found that merely repeating positive statements to yourself does not raise mood or achievement very much, if at all. It is how you cope with negative statements that has an effect.
Learned optimism works not through an unjustifiable positivity about the world but through the power of “non-negative” thinking.
The main tool for changing your interpretations of adversity is disputation. Practice disputing your automatic interpretations all the time from now on. Anytime you find yourself down or anxious or angry, ask what you are saying to yourself.
Many children suffer terribly from pessimism, a condition that torments them through the years to come, ruining their education and livelihoods, spoiling their happiness.
Worst of all, pessimism embeds itself as a way of looking at the world, and childhood pessimism is the father and mother of adult pessimism.
Common sense tells us that success makes people optimistic. But in this book we have seen repeatedly that the arrow goes in the opposite direction as well. Optimistic people become successes. In school, on the playing field, and at work, the optimistic individual makes the most of his talent.
Everyone has his own point of discouragement, his own wall. What you do when you hit this wall can spell the difference between helplessness and mastery, between failure and success.
Talent and drive alone are not enough. As we have seen, without an unshakable belief that you can succeed, high talent and relentless drive can come to nothing.
WHAT YOU THINK when things go wrong, what you say to yourself when you come to the wall, will determine what happens next: whether you give up or whether you start to make things go right.
If you can habitually make these three moves at the point of belief, adversity can become a springboard to success.
From permanent to temporary (only this time), from pervasive to local (only this incident), and from personal to external (it's not about me).
One of the walls managers face is to keep the level of incentive high among the people they supervise. As one manager put it: “Managing people can be very frustrating at times … at least periodically. The hardest part, the part I really dread, is to keep people motivated and productive. I try to be positive, I try to lead by example, but sometimes I just don’t understand what is going through their heads. And then of course, after I have gotten on someone’s case, I end up feeling like such a nag. I don’t want to be too easy on them, I don’t want to be too tough on them, so in the end I feel as
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You should have found that when you began to dispute your negative beliefs, the consequences changed from dejection and lethargy to invigoration and feeling better.
For better or for worse, we are now a culture of maximal selves. We freely choose among an abundance of customized goods and services and reach beyond them to grasp more exquisite freedoms. Along with the freedoms the expanded self brings some dangers. Chief among them is massive depression. I believe that our epidemic of depression is a creature of the maximal self.
THE LIFE COMMITTED to nothing larger than itself is a meager life indeed. Human beings require a context of meaning and hope. We used to have ample context, and when we encountered failure, we could pause and take our rest in that setting—our spiritual furniture—and revive our sense of who we were. I call the larger setting the commons. It consists of a belief in the nation, in God, in one’s family, or in a purpose that transcends our lives.
So put together the lack of belief that your relationship to God matters, the breakdown of your belief in the benevolent power of your country, and the breakdown of the family. Where can one now turn for identity, for purpose, and for hope? When we need spiritual furniture, we look around and see that all the comfortable leather sofas and stuffed chairs have been removed and all that’s left to sit on is a small, frail folding chair: the self. And the maximal self, stripped of the buffering of any commitment to what is larger in life, is a setup for depression.
I am not going to be foolish enough to attempt to define meaning for you, but one necessary condition for meaning is the attachment to something larger than you are. The larger the entity you can attach yourself to, the more meaning you can derive.
The self, to put it another way, is a very poor site for meaning.
Another, frightening possibility is that, in order to shed depression and attain meaning, we will rashly surrender the newly won freedoms that individualism brings, giving up personal control and concern for the individual. The twentieth century is riddled with disastrous examples of societies that have done just this to cure their ills. The current yearning for fundamentalist religion throughout the world appears to be such a response.
If you engage in activity in service of the commons long enough, it will gain meaning for you. You may find that you get depressed less easily, that you get sick less often, and that you feel better acting for the common good than indulging in solitary pleasures. Most important, an emptiness inside you, the meaninglessness that rampant individualism nurtures, will begin to fill.
When learned optimism is coupled with a renewed commitment to the commons, our epidemic of depression and meaninglessness may end.
And what of the born optimist? Until now, he was as much a slave to the tyrannies of optimism as the pessimist was to the tyrannies of pessimism. He got great benefits: less depression, better health, higher achievement. He was even more likely to be elected to high office. But he paid a price: benign illusions, a weaker sense of responsibility. Until now.
