Page 78 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

“On the contrary, sir, I see Apollo 13 as being our finest hour.” And he turned

out to be right, which illustrates the life-or-death effectiveness of optimistic
thinking.

Whenever you feel pessimistic or overwhelmed, remember to keep thinking.
The more you think about a situation, the more you will see small opportunities
for action—and the more small actions you take, the more optimistic energy you
will receive. An optimist keeps thinking and self-motivates. A pessimist quits
thinking—and then just quits.

In the Broadway musical South Pacific, the heroine sings apologetically
about being a “cock-eyed optimist.” She admits she’s “immature and incurably
green.” This was an early version of a blonde joke. She confesses, as the giddy
song soars melodically, that she’s “stuck like a dope on a thing called hope and I
can’t get it out of my heart…not this heart.” That’s how our society has viewed

optimists—they are dopes. Society thinks optimistic thinking is something that
comes from the heart, not the head. Pessimists, on the other hand, are “realistic.”
In fact, pessimists will never tell you they are pessimists. In their own minds,
they are realists. And when they run into habitual optimists they sneer at them
for always “blue-skying” everything, and not facing grim reality.

Pessimists continually use their imaginations to visualize worst-case
scenarios, and then, concluding that those scenarios are lost causes, they take no
action. That’s why pessimism always leads to passivity.

But even lying on his couch, bloated with junk food and foggy from too
much television, the pessimist knows somewhere in his heart that his “what’s the
use?” attitude is not effective. He is living a life that is reflected in what
Nietzsche once said: “Everything in the world displeased me; but what
displeased me most was my displeasure with everything.”

Optimists have chosen to make a different use of the human imagination.
They agree with Colin Wilson’s point of view that “imagination should be used,
not to escape from reality, but to create it.”

54. Put on a good debate

Negative thinking is something we all do. The difference between the person
who is primarily optimistic and the person who is primarily pessimistic is that
the optimist learns to become a good debater. Once you become thoroughly