20th Oct, 2021
Whenever Iam feeling despondent and down,
I always remember the words of the legendary John Lennon,
“Everything will be okay in the end,
If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
And a parable which comes into mind immediately and inspires me to go on is –
Thomas Edison tried two thousand different materials in search of a filament for the light bulb.
When none worked satisfactorily, his assistant complained,
“All our work is in vain.
We have learned nothing.”
Edison replied very confidently, “Oh, we have come a long way and we have learned a lot.
We know that there are two thousand elements which we cannot use to make a good light bulb.”
However most people prefer being pessimists and the reasons for that are many. It’s hard to argue. Despite the record of things getting better for most people most of the time, pessimism isn’t just more common than optimism, it also sounds smarter. It’s intellectually captivating, and paid more attention to than the optimist who is often viewed as an oblivious sucker.
Historian Deirdre N. Mc Closkey once wrote, “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell,”
It’s always been this way. John Stuart Mill wrote 150 years ago: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.”
Matt Ridley also wrote in his book, ‘The Rational Optimist’: “If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naïve and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad. If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur genius award or even the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Optimism sounds like a sales pitch, while pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you
Should you ever listen to pessimists? Of course. According to me, they’re the best indication of what’s unsustainable, and thus probably about to change. Pessimists extrapolate present trends without accounting for how reliably markets adapt.
‘A bad attitude is like a flat tyre, we cannot reach anywhere until we change it.’
Though A pessimist may always sound more intelligent, But an optimist will always be more successful.
Be an optimist always and stay blessed forever.