Pessimism Cloaked as Realism Considered Harmful - DBR 075

This one's about optimism and pessimism, and what that has to do with productivity. I and the whole thing is a productivity concern for me. We talk about confidence around these parts. That’s because I think confidence ties to productivity. The tie there is imposter syndrome. We struggle to understand what confidence is. But confidence is fundamental to what we're trying to do, particularly as knowledge workers.

By the same token, optimism is fundamental to productivity. A lot of this has to do with long term career growth rather than just simple productivity. We'll leave that career growth potential aside, and just talk about productivity now.

The problem

• The problem is that many people are pessimists
• If you are not confident in your ability to do something, then your ability to do that thing is going to be quite limited
• The invisible work that we do leads to negative mental gymnastics like writer's block and imposter syndrome.
• Our feelings about a thing do have a lot to do with our ability to do and thus I think we should cultivate optimism

I’ll give you some tools and motivation to embrace optimism, if you’re an optimist and work to become an optimist, if you’re not

Realistic positivity - optimism

• vs “Toxic positivity”
• Definition of discipline
• Mental landscape and productivity

The science

• Learned helplessness
• Growth mindset is pretty close to a good definition of optimism
• Grit

Counter arguments

• I'm not a pessimist about me. I'm a pessimist about the world.
• Optimism as naivete, realism is rational
• Limiting disappointment by managing expectations

Engineering mindset

• Definition of work
• Problem solving
• Tenacity

Recap

I hope I've convinced you that optimism is the most productive, practical mindset. You should now have some tools to help you cultivate optimism in your life and work. Remember, you've solved many problems and (to date) have survived the worst news you've received. You can do it.

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