Quotes About Optimism

When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing.

It's a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.

The attentive System 2 is who we think we are. System 2 articulates judgments and makes choices, but it often endorses or rationalizes ideas and feelings that were generated by System 1. You may not know that you are optimistic about a project because something about its leader reminds you of your beloved sister, or that you dislike a person who looks vaguely like your dentist.

The general tendency to overestimate the probability of conjunctive events leads to unwarranted optimism in the evaluation of the likelihood that a plan will succeed or that a project will be completed on time.

More generally, the financial benefits of self-employment are mediocre: given the same qualifications, people achieve higher average return by selling their skills to employers than by setting out on their own. The evidence suggests that optimism is widespread, stubborn, and costly. Psychologists have confirmed that most people genuinely believe they are superior to most others on most desirable traits - they are willing to bet small amounts of money on these beliefs in the laboratory.

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be.

The brief pleasure of a cool breeze on a hot day may make you slightly more positive and optimistic about whatever you are evaluating at that time.

When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations.

More generally, the financial benefits of self-employment are mediocre: given the same qualifications, people achieve higher average returns by selling their skills to employers than by setting out on their own. The evidence suggests that optimism is widespread, stubborn, and costly.

Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person—you already feel fortunate. An optimistic attitude is largely inherited, and it is part of a general disposition for well-being, which may also include a preference for seeing the bright side of everything.

It is tempting to explain entrepreneurial optimism by wishful thinking, but emotion is only part of the story. Cognitive biases play an important role, notably the System 1 feature WYSIATI.

In this view, people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face. I will return to this idea several times in this book—it probably contributes to an explanation of why people litigate, why they start wars, and why they open small businesses.

people tend to be overly optimistic about their relative standing on any activity in which they do moderately well.

El exceso de optimismo de los directivos puede atribuirse tanto a sesgos cognitivos (errores en el procesamiento mental de la información) como a presiones organizativas.

Los estudios sobre cognición humana atribuyen este exceso de optimismo a numerosos motivos. Uno de los más poderosos es la tendencia de los individuos a exagerar el propio talento, a creer que están por encima de la media en su asignación de características y habilidades positivas.

AND NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES YOU FAIL, WHILE LIFE REMAINS YOU CAN ALWAYS GIVE YOURSELF ANOTHER CHANCE EVEN IF NO ONE ELSE WILL; CAN ALWAYS CHOOSE TO TRY AGAIN.

In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip.

I'm not Candide, nor Dr Pangloss, but we know that faith moves mountains.

most people do pretty well when things go pretty bad.

Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times, the wealth of experience that young people admire does not always pay clear dividends.

Ten thousand grateful people jammed Sunday's enormous tabernacle to hear him announce the death of liquor and reveal the advent of an earthly paradise. "The reign of tears is over," Sunday proclaimed. "The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.

General George Patton wrote from long experience: "There are more tired division commanders than there are tired divisions. Tired officers are always pessimists." The lieutenant was tired. His sergeants were not. They wanted to continue the mission.

When counterterrorism officers feel optimism, innocent people usually end up dead. - Gabriel Allon