Optimism

But even healthy minds will be pessimistic or optimistic from day to day. The author suggests the explanations we think of dictate our mood, which is true, but also our mood already dictates those thoughts. Our explanations tend to be negative when we're feeling negative. You're just sad already.

The question is this: Is your explanation an objective description of truth, or is it an honest expression of your mood? And it's almost always both. Most explicit negative or positive explanations are also implicit expressions of your mood. Our inner dialog is always emotional, so when we reason with ourselves, we're already reasoning with our emotions, except, they have already happened.

And here is how it works. Intellectual people are capable of coming up with an infinite number of reasons. Give it enough thought and you'll find yourself cataloging reason after reason. The sleight of hand happens when we choose the reason to go with. If you let your gut choose, you'll go with the one that most closely aligns with how you feel, because it will physically feel right. It just clicks. So we reason because of our mood, and further towards that mood. And if you have a working brain, you are an intellectual person.

And here is the common misconception. A reason does not have to be subjective or false to be emotional. All your reasons can be true. The problem is with your selection. Think misuse of statistics [1]. All your data can be true, but can be made to say whatever you want. Conclusions can be written first, then made true. If we can do it with statistics, we can certainly do it with our perception. And this article along with Dr. Martin Seligman methods basically covers the various ways in which we do just that.

So whenever possible just make your mood explicit. Monitor your mood, and take hints from the implicit emotions in whatever thoughts that are about something else. If they're in any way negative or positive, then that's already a clue, because if you think about it, nature isn't inherently either. And if you're down, act on it, don't reason with it. Just hit mute, and physically do things that make you happy (I splurge on a hard root beer or a premium cup of coffee). If your body and mind are healthy, this will work every time. If nothing you do makes you happy, don't feel guilty, just go see a doctor.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_statistics

(right when I try to block HN to concentrate on work, I find articles like these, and am heavily rewarded again for my procrastination :)

I saw this talk in person at Nordic Ruby, and it was one of the best talks I've seen (and I've seen a bunch). Strangely enough, I don't really think back and think much about "optimism" when I think of the talk, though, even though the talk is about optimists.

My takeaway was the type of tooling and thought processes that are advantageous when approaching problems and conflict. In many talks — mine included — people will say something along the lines of "be nice to your teammates and leave good feedback", for example, but that's really vague. Reg's talk helped me understand what that type of feedback might be, how it can be explicitly phrased, and how I can give concrete feedback without being antagonistic. I think it makes for a more effective argument, especially when building product, but also it just makes for friendlier humans.

Yeah, this does lead to "optimistic people", hence the title, but I just thought it was weird to see discussion here about the merits of positive people versus negative people. I think the talk's a much bigger dialogue about interacting with humans and, possibly more importantly, yourself.

Anyway, I really liked the talk, and as much as this Markdown is great at getting the point across, this is one of the talks I'd suggest actually watching. \m/