Optimism, hope, faith in a better future give warmth and meaning to our lives, and energy and conviction to our actions. Although absolute confidence in the future somehow removes the responsibility for today. What does hope contribute to: courage or, on the contrary, patience; action or expectation?
Optimism, hope, faith in a better future give warmth and meaning to our lives, and energy and conviction to our actions. Although absolute confidence in the future somehow removes the responsibility for today. You can relax and not worry: communism will come anyway, whether I want it or not. What does hope contribute to: courage or, on the contrary, patience; action or expectation? And the loss of hope is despair, giving up, or, on the contrary, shaking off the remnants of illusions and moving on to sober activity?
There are two sides of hope in this contradiction. The constructive, mobilizing side is that hope gives strength and energy to actions, the outcome of which is not guaranteed, and patience where all that remains is to wait. At the same time, it binds us to the chosen strategy of actions and does not allow us to think about how to change them, keeps us in the sweet fetters of illusions. Research shows that optimists are much more successful than pessimists where they can and should rely on their past experience. For optimists, it is positive: applying it with all their energy, they achieve success faster than more cautious and doubting pessimists. However, there are situations in life in which past experience does not help, tasks that cannot be solved by known methods. And here the optimists are the losers: it is difficult for them to recognize the former path as unpromising. Pessimists, seeing that something is not working out, are ready to abandon the usual, look for other ways — suddenly it will turn out differently. And they find them earlier than optimists who have not yet parted with hope. Optimists are more successful in professions where the potential gain is large and the error is not so catastrophic, such as marketing and advertising. And where it is most important not to make a mistake — say, in accounting, analytics or expertise — pessimists do better.
Neither optimism nor pessimism stems from objective data; on the contrary, they are different ways of interpreting the same facts. As the American psychologist showed Martin Seligman, optimists consider good events to be regular and constant, and bad events to be random and irregular. Pessimists, respectively, on the contrary. The sources of optimism and pessimism are not in the surrounding life, but in ourselves.
In fact, hardened optimists and pessimists have a lot in common. Both of them know exactly what will happen next, they appropriate the prerogatives of God for themselves — who else can foresee the future? The golden mean is the recognition of the limitations of our foresight, the readiness for both success and failure. And most importantly, don’t forget to put in your effort.