Optimism is a matter of mental habit. You can learn to practice the habit of optimism — and thereby greatly enhance your chances of achieving success. Or you can drive yourself into the pit of pessimism and failure.
Optimism is one of the most important traits of a pleasing personality. But it results largely from other traits we have discussed — a good sense of humor, hopefulness, the ability to overcome fear, contentment, a positive mental attitude, flexibility, faith, and decisiveness.
The pessimist fears the Devil and spends most of his time fighting him.
The optimist loves his Creator and spends his time worshipping Him.
You can fight pessimism through complete belief in two of the most basic truths of the Science of Success:
1. “Whatever the mind of Man can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”
2. “Every adversity and defeat carries the seed of an equivalent benefit, if we are ingenious enough to find it.”
Lay Pleasant Plans
Instead of worrying about the bad things that might befall you, spend a few minutes every day numerating the pleasant events that will happen tomorrow, next week, and this New Year! By thinking about them, you will find yourself laying plans to make them happen! Then you are getting the habit of optimism.
Remember that no great leader or successful man was ever a pessimist. What could such a leader promise his followers but despair and defeat?
Even in the darkest days of the Civil War, leaders on both sides — such as Lincoln and Lee — held faith in better days to come.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s natural optimism breathed a new spirit of hope into a dejected nation in the depths of the Depression.
Even infamous leaders — the Hitlers, Stalins, Mussolinis and Maos — rely on the promise of better days to win followers with such catch phrases as “tomorrow the world,” “nothing to lose but your chains,” and “the new Asia.”
Can you — living under the finest social economic and political system in human history — afford to have any less?
Remember that like attracts like in human relations, no matter what the rule may be in the physical world. An optimist tends to congregate with optimists, just as success attracts more success.
But the pessimist breeds worries and trouble without speaking a word or performing an act because his negative mental attitude serves as a perfect magnet for them.
Optimism is, in itself, a kind of success. For it means you have a healthy, peaceful and contented mind. An exceedingly wealthy man can be a failure physically, if his constant pessimism has brought him a case of ulcers.
Optimism isn’t a state of mind in which you throw judgment to the winds in starry-eyed belief future events will take care of themselves. Such an outlook is only for fools.
Use Sound Judgment
It is however, a firm belief that you can make things come out right by thinking ahead and deciding on a course of action based on sound judgment. Let me give an example.
At the height of the big boom of 1928, there were those false optimists who refused to believe that the bubble could ever burst. They jeered those few farsighted “pessimists” who warned that the nation was treading on dangerously inflationary and speculative ground.
When the bottom dropped out, the “optimists” were caught short. Many lacked the spiritual strength to seek victory in defeat and revealed themselves as the true pessimists.
But those who had looked ahead fearlessly and honestly had put themselves in position by selling stock short and other devices — to make a killing. They were revealed as the true optimists.
You can be that kind of optimist. Learn to meet the future head-on. Analyze it. Weigh the factors with clear judgment. Then decide upon your course of action to make things turn out the way you want them.
You’ll find that the future holds nothing that you ever need fear.
Source: Miami Daily News, Science of Success Series, June & July 1956 by Napoleon Hill