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Pessimism as a Rule of Success- The Advantages of Negative Thinking [1]
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Date: 2023-05-31
When I was a teenager my mom bought a women's magazine that had a very interesting article in it, as many of them did back then. I forget the exact title but it was something like, 'Seven Rules of Success,' written by someone who had actually studied successful people and had tried to uncover what it was about them that made them successful.
I don't remember all of the rules but one of them was that successful people were pessimistic.
This may seem counterintuitive and it certainly goes against the positive thinking of Norman Vincent Peale and the like, who literally believe that thoughts are so powerful that good thoughts bring good things into one's life and bad thoughts bring bad things into one's life as a sort of super-material magical power. Positive thinkers are absolutely terrified of any negative thought. They believe that it will curse them into failure.
But the writers of the article had found otherwise. They had discovered that a negative person who is always looking for flaws and potential problems is the one who will take action to avoid those potential mistakes and, if they do make a mistake, can see clearly and honestly enough to admit their mistake and to correct it.
The eternal optimist, on the other hand, will never try to see what they are doing wrong and will blindly charge forward, driving ninety miles an hour on the icy mountain road in the belief that all is well and all will be well in this best of all possible worlds.
From what I can recall, the article used the example of a businesswoman famous for her cosmetic company. Her chemists had developed a facial cream that was fine and good but it had one flaw; if it was heated above a certain point it would turn rancid. The woman instantly rejected it and the chemists didn't understand why, insisting that it had to be heated to spoil and who would do that? The businesswoman told them, inevitably some customer was going to leave it on a radiator. Then when it went bad she would blame the company she bought it from.
The "Yeah but what is the down side?" attitude would certainly have been helpful in many political campaigns. What if Dukakis had realized that he looked like Alfred E Neuman in that helmet? What if someone had told Kerry not to go windsurfing? What if someone had suggested that many people were simply too stupid to even understand what a basket of deplorables was?
Or on the other hand, what if someone had told DeSantis not to wear white boots?
What if someone had told Hitler not to invade Poland? What if someone had told Putin not to invade Ukraine?
And no, I am not going to go into the argument of what is constructive criticism and what is destructive criticism. Criticism is analysis. It is only negative if one refuses to accept it.
The point is that anyone who wants to be successful has to look at their mistakes or they are going to do foolish things, refuse to correct course, and will crash. “Finding fault” is a good thing. How else can you correct that fault?
Just my two cents as a pessimist and cynic.
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