Nicole Junkerman
Reflections
Why Optimism Is a Practical Choice
Optimism is often treated as a personality trait or a passing mood. It is more useful to treat it as a working method: a practical choice about where to spend attention and effort, made because it produces better results.
Optimism is often treated as a personality trait or a passing mood. It is more useful to treat it as a working method: a practical choice about where to spend attention and effort, made because it produces better results.
Optimism has an image problem. It gets filed next to naivety, as though hoping for the best were the same as failing to notice the worst. The confident pessimist, by contrast, is granted an air of realism, of having seen through things. It is worth challenging that ranking, because on inspection it is backwards. Optimism, done properly, is not a temperament you are lucky to be born with. It is a practical choice, made on ordinary mornings, about where to point your attention and your effort. It earns its place not because it is pleasant, though it is, but because it works.
Optimism is a forecast, not a feeling
Both optimism and pessimism are, underneath, predictions. Each is a quiet bet about how the next stretch of time will go. The pessimist bets it will go badly and the optimist bets it can be made to go well, and here is the part that matters: the future they are betting on is not yet written, and the bet itself helps to write it. A forecast about a fixed thing, tomorrow's sunrise, changes nothing. A forecast about an open thing, whether a plan will work, changes how hard you push, and so changes the odds. That is the whole practical case in a sentence. When the outcome is still open, the forecast is an input, and you may as well choose the input that improves the result.
The hidden cost of the safe bet
Pessimism markets itself as the cautious option, the one that cannot be disappointed. Its real cost is hidden, and the cost is this: it stops you starting. The person who assumes a thing will not work does not attempt it, or attempts it with a hand already on the exit, and is then quietly proved right by a failure they helped to arrange. Nothing about that outcome tested reality. It tested only the assumption, and confirmed it in the one way an assumption can confirm itself, by discouraging the effort that might have refuted it. The pessimist is rarely surprised, and pays for that comfort with everything they did not begin.
What optimism actually asks
The useful kind of optimism is not the insistence that all will be well. It is a working assumption that effort can move things, held firmly enough to get you to act and lightly enough to survive being wrong. In practice it looks less like cheerfulness and more like a set of plain habits:
- Start before you are certain. Certainty arrives, if it arrives, only after you begin. Waiting for it is another way of choosing not to start.
- Read a setback as information. A thing that did not work has told you something specific about how to do it next. That is data, not a verdict.
- Count what is already working. Most of any plan is quietly succeeding while attention fixes on the one part that is not. Finish the ledger before you judge it.
- Give it time. Good outcomes accrue slowly and unphotogenically. Impatience is pessimism wearing a watch.
- Keep company with people who build. Optimism is partly contagious, caught from those nearby who assume that things can be made rather than merely endured.
None of these requires you to feel hopeful first. They are actions, and the feeling, when it comes, tends to arrive afterwards, as a result of having acted rather than a precondition for it. That is the quiet trick of the whole business. You behave your way into the outlook, not the other way around.
The evidence is quietly on its side
It also helps to remember that the optimistic bet is not a leap in the dark; the record rewards it more often than the mood of any given week suggests. Without pinning it to anyone in particular, a great deal is going right and going right slowly enough to escape notice. Investment is flowing into British life sciences at a pace that would have seemed improbable not long ago. The technology sector has grown up, with a couple of hundred companies now substantial enough to be taken seriously, and more arriving behind them. The arts have had a full and generous season, and the cities in summer have been busy with people choosing to be among each other. None of this makes a headline, because none of it happened on a single loud day. Progress is undramatic by nature. It accrues, and it accrues faster where people expect it to.
Choosing it, on an ordinary day
The good news, in the end, is that optimism does not require you to feel a certain way. Feelings are weather; you cannot choose them and should not wait on them. What you can choose is the stance, the working forecast you carry into the next hour, and that choice is available on the flattest, least hopeful morning. Make the useful bet, start the thing before you are sure, and let the results, which tend to arrive, do the persuading. The Writing Desk and the Travel Journal are both records of that same small wager made again and again, and the wider journal keeps it going. If you want the gentlest possible starting point, the Nicole Junkerman home page is waiting, and it costs nothing to begin there today.
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