"That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you." - A. Whitney Brown

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The Dark Side of Optimism: Why looking on the bright side keeps us from thinking critically

"“Negativity,” an awkward coinage, has widely come to be used pejoratively. Magical thinking, too, has become increasingly popular as a way to gain the illusion of control in an uncertain world. Rhonda Byrne’s motivational best-seller The Secret, for example, basically says that you get what you wish for. If you don’t have the things you want, it means you don’t have enough faith. In this construct, neither insufficient effort nor bad luck plays a role.

In the business world, we’ve moved from hardheaded to feel-good management... "An illogical love of Yes is the basis for all modern management thought. The ideal modern manager is meant to be enabling, empowering, encouraging and nurturing, which means that his default position must be Yes. By contrast, No is considered demotivating, uncreative and a thoroughly bad thing.”

To illustrate, Tom Peters’ Leadership offers an impossible, irreconcilable list of exhortations... Not only are his executives reluctant to say no—they don’t develop any of the guts of what managing is really about: making decisions under uncertainty, creating routines, developing (not merely exhorting) direct reports, responding to crises, building in enough slack to deal with low-probability but high-consequence opportunities and risks...

What archetypes do we have for the anodyne analyst? In mythology, Hermes and Loki were clever but also troublemakers and tricksters. Science fiction, too, has long depicted alien beings as detached, logic-driven Cassandras whose warnings are invariably brushed off by upbeat, forward-thinking Earthlings (whose impetuosity, more often than not, saves the day)...

We’re always told to look on the bright side of things, to stay positive. After all, individuals and companies need a positive outlook to succeed, right? Isn’t positive thinking essential for progress? Not necessarily. No one is encouraging pessimism; rather, evidence from top-performing companies suggests that success lies in a realistic outlook...

Jim Collins, in Good to Great, found that his top-performing companies confronted the brutal facts"

One box: "For centuries—at least since the Greeks coined the word hubris—critics have warned of the dangers of overweening optimism. Take Croesus, who thrust into Persia on the Delphic oracle’s vague prediction that if he crossed the Halys River, “a great empire would be destroyed.” That empire turned out to be his own.

Executives, of course, often look to warfare for models, and military history is rife with other examples of leaders who overestimated their odds of success, with disastrous results: Hitler attacked Russia, ignoring his generals and the cautionary examples of Napoleon’s and Charles XII of Sweden’s failed invasions. Robert E. Lee came to believe in his troops’ invincibility and chose to storm well-positioned Union forces at Gettysburg against the advice of Gen. James Longstreet. The World War I battle of Gallipoli was the product of so much misguided Allied thinking that one wonders how it could possibly have gone ahead. And in the Iraq misadventure, the United States ignored postwar planning out of a belief that Iraqis would welcome American forces—even though it is well-nigh impossible to come up with an example of an occupying army ever being well-received."


The article claims that optimism works for individuals, but that seems like special pleading.