Have you ever realised that when you share a date and time to meet a friend, a client or a relative; when you book that flight or the tickets to a cricket match or movie; when you save for a trip, a car; or when you plan a child, what you’re doing is an act of deep optimism.
Surprised? Just think about it: the reality of life is that you could die any moment, so how do you assume that you’ll be alive to go to that movie, travel on that trip, or watch that cricket match? It’s because of optimism.
Yet, we think all the time that optimism is an active muscle you need to exercise consciously, or worse still, berate or scoff at it as the refuge of the weak.
That’s because we mistake optimism to be some sort of a foolish hope against hope, a utopian ideology, a tragic guise of fatal naïveté. But it’s none of that.
Optimism is simply an act of implicit positive faith; a silent belief that your will shall be done; that your world will not come crashing down on you the next moment; and that you don’t need to be paranoid about failure, destruction and doom.
And optimism is our natural state of thinking and being, too. Except that often we are disturbed from this equilibrium due to a variety of external circumstances messing up our internal affairs. That is when you need to wake up and course-correct.
This doesn’t mean you just change your mindset and sit on your haunches, assuming that everything will be all right on its own. Yes; the results of your actions are not in your hands, but you still need to put in the work! If you failed an exam once, just attending the reexamination optimistically will not help. Instead, shrugging off the disappointment of the failure, working harder and smarter, and then entering the reexamination better prepared and optimistic – that is what will.
So you see, optimism is a fundamental driver of change, progress and achievement. It’s not a theory or philosophy to propagate; it’s a state of mind crucial to improving things.
Have an optimistic month!
