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I've no idea where this was at, geographically/physically, so maybe it's a local custom or style or something?
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It also sounds to me like a pessimistic attitude can be very useful, especially if it guards a person against taking unnecessary risks and trying to overreach beyond his or her capabilities.
Isn't it desirable to have a healthy mixture of both attitudes rather than just one?
TLDR; To be more optimistic assess good stuff as personal, general, and permanent and negative as impersonal, specific and temporal. Make notes everyday about your assessments and correct them. There is research backing this thesis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since it's been 7+ years since you made this change personally, what has been your long term experience? Has the change stuck? Have you had periods of struggle? Thanks.
My experience is: First, there was a dramatic immediate improvement. I feel like some of that was the material, and some the "Hawthorne Effect:" Anything that forces you to inspect yourself has a short-term beneficial effect. For example, if you tell someone to count their calories, they usually eat better for a month or two simply because counting the calories forces awareness. Second, I have slipped from time to ti…
I'd like to help someone who I feel is overly pessimistic, but they are very skeptic of self-help books and therapies, did you feel that way? Do you have any tips to help overcome that?
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Seems like you are describing a part of it.
I guess that's how religions are born.
A straight-text extract would be a far more useful presentation online. Following an @idlewords-type presentation, with images to the side of the main text would also help.
I have modest interest in reading this, but not so much that I'm willing to put up with entirely self-inflicted idiosyncracies to do so.
TL;DR, references to Pandora's recommendation algorithm:
Describe GOOD things broadly, permanently, and personally. Describe BAD things specifically, temporally, and impersonally.
Now let's think about Pandora. Specifically, Pandora's recommendation that you thumbs up (upvote) a few things, and thumbs down (downvote) many more things. Why?
Let's think about Pandora's recommendation algorithm, or, recommendation algorithms in general (pandora's is good because you can give input every ~5 minutes, as opposed to Netflix, where it's ~1hr). Note: Not an expert! I just read stuff on the internet a lot.
Pandora takes your upvote, and it promotes an entire region of music-space. Pandora takes you downvote, and it demotes a very narrow region of music-space. In other words, it broadly interacts with GOOD things, and specifically interacts with BAD things. Pandora isn't passing judgement on you, but it is a personal thing (or, really, per-channel), and you can un-vote anything; so it at first glance it doesn't apply on the other axis but I wouldn't put it past them if my upvotes carried across channels (so they're more personal, while the downvotes stay "impersonal" to each channel), and it might be better if downvotes decayed in some way over time.
In any event, you can imagine what this looks like in state-space: You start with a broadly defined region, and you start taking holes out of it.
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