Optimistic or Pessimistic or...?

I have been always amused by people advising towards positive thinking. And I have tried to understand how positive thinking works. Basic rule of positive thinking are look at the positive side of everything that is happening in your life. Take on everything with a smile. Believe in you and believe that you can do it. And there are quite a lot of such positive injections that you can take to become a ‘positive thinking’ person.

Well, I asked myself, is it always possible for a person to think positive? In any situation or circumstance he can be positive in his approach? Does thinking positive means assume that everything that would happen will be good? Does it mean nothing will go wrong? Does it mean whatever we do will succeed? Does it mean you start with the assumption or belief that there will be no failure?

Now, if the answers to all the above doubts are “Yes”, then the next question that rises is “What if…?” What if – something goes wrong? What if something doesn’t happen the way I wanted it to? What if something fails? What if I were not able to do what I had to? What if something turns out to be a mistake?

Well, that is considered as ‘negative thinking’. All positive thinkers in general, advise that negative thinking discourages one from getting up and running. It dissuades one from putting his best efforts. It pulls one back from the momentum he should be gaining by positive thinking. Hence, don’t do negative thinking. Just think positive, think everything’s going be alright and move on.

Now, is that really true? Does negative thinking always bring bad to you? Is pessimism always discouraging? Is a Pessimist always a loser?

Psychologists have started looking at pessimism as a tool towards analyzing and preparing oneself for the worst. Researchers have found that under emergency situations, a pessimist analyses, controls and reacts to the situation much better than a normal or an optimistic person. While a normal person juggles between pros and cons an optimist rides on over-confidence, ignoring trouble-signs and makes mistakes. Under normal situations, a normal person performs better than both optimist and a pessimist. In totally conducive situations, an optimist excels, while a normal person just performs and a pessimist fails to produce the required results. Strange though.

Why a pessimist should not perform well during positive conditions, while he does excel during negative conditions?

A pessimist is always looking for something to fail or something is about to fail and he wants to be prepared for the best possible remedial or repair action. That is what makes him satisfied. “I told you that it will break and you didn’t listen”. Then they go about carrying out the perfect repair act. Surprisingly they have all the tools and kits ready with them always, for any such repairs. But, if something doesn’t fail, they brood over their predictions, they wine over their chance to prove that they were the best cautious people on earth and they were the best to provide repair actions. In this anxiety, they ignore the positive side of what happened and what they could have contributed or achieved if only they didn’t look for the unlikely failures.

A normal person looks at the positive sides of any situation as well as the negative sides at the same time. Though not to the degree of seriousness and depth as a pessimist or optimist would do, normal persons do take care of both sides and get better results than an optimist or a pessimist.

Psychologists have suggested that if you are in a plane that is about to do an emergency landing, pray that the Pilot is a pessimist and not an optimist. Funny? Not really.

A pessimist mind, when pushed to the situation of life or death, works like a super computer. Because of the inherent nature, a pessimist stores thousands of data in his mind that could help alleviating any potential ‘problem’ that he could come across in future. And his mind works super fast in analyzing those data and bringing forward possible solutions in milliseconds and unfortunately or fortunately, he has to ‘act’ this time. And when he acts, he is extremely careful in handling every bit of it, to make sure he does it right, to his satisfaction.

On the other hand, an optimist, brushes aside some tell-tale signs of potential problems, even though he knows the solutions, he doesn’t prepare to tackle such problems. He rides generally on his previous successes and believes that this time too he would succeed. He looks for signs for those problems, which he solved before and if those don’t exist, he moves on. He could be lucky if everyone is fortunate but he could be unlucky if all are unfortunate. There would be no time to do a post-analysis and he would not realize that.

Now coming to a normal person, he looks at his previous success and failures, though not to the last detail. Still he takes decisions fast and takes corrective actions for problems. He could be in the middle of the other two, in terms of luck and failure.

Now, Does it mean that it is not that good to be an optimist or a positive thinker?

Not entirely true.

Consider this. Imagine that a person is a combination of an optimist and a pessimist. He analyses every event in pessimistic angle, stores the cause and results of all events in his mind. Now, when he plans an action, he utilizes all the data stored, develops a comprehensive action plan. Now, the hitch here is that, he doesn’t execute the actions in a positive way. Every time he makes a move, he might retract back, make few more checks and analyzes the situation during which he might loose previous time for moving forward. That’s where a pessimist fails to produce results. He broods over the actions and fears of the failure even if he had prepared all remedial measures.

Here, if he can execute the plan like an optimist, he would look at the positive sides of the situation in front of him and move forward, with all the back up that were developed by the pessimist ready to fall back at any time. That confidence makes him move faster than others and he reaches the goal with perfect precision. If he were only optimist, he would be left with few fallbacks and any unexpected failure would leave him with few or without any fallbacks.

Call it defensive pessimism as some psychologists call, or pessimistic optimism. Or just call it by the simple well-known way, ‘practical’.

In a team, if we have one pessimist and a few optimist, the team could excel, with the down to the last nail analysis and fall-back plans of the pessimist and the enthusiasm and motivation of the optimists.

The problem with Negative thinkers is, they identify all the problems that could possibly happen and use those as ‘excuses’ for not acting or not moving forward.

The problem with Positive thinkers is, they fail to identify some minor or sometimes major, but hidden problems, and when confronted with those situations, they fumble.

If one can do a little bit of both, they are cautiously aggressive in their analysis and actions, which would truly bring in the best possible results.

So, when next time you have somebody telling you not to do something, instead of ignoring them, ask them why and understand the reasons from them. Possibly it could help you in future, when faced with similar situation.

Tags: optimistic, pessimistic, positive thinking, negative thinking

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