Can you train yourself (or someone else) to become an optimist?

Sarita and I were talking about built-in predilections concerning how we think, how we perceive the world, how we feel about things.

Our eldest daughter, Amy, has been an advocate of the Enneagram as a tool for understanding personalities and, Sarita says, Amy and I are both obvious "gut" people. We respond from the gut. Viscerallly.

(I wrote to a co-worker this past week concerning something I had read: "It makes me want to throw up." And concerning a certain set of ideas in the article: "I hate that thought." --Visceral responses, said Sarita. And I think she is right.)

Anyway.

So then I ran across this story from Randy Cassingham's JumboJoke.com: The Optimist and the Pessimist on Christmas Morning:

A family had twin boys whose only resemblance to each other was their looks. If one felt it was too hot, the other thought it was too cold. If one said the TV was too loud, the other claimed the volume needed to be turned up.

But worst of all, one was an eternal optimist, and the other a doom and gloom pessimist, so their father decided to play a trick on them both.

On Christmas morning they found two huge boxes under the tree. The pessimist's box had the greatest, most expensive toy ever. The optimist's box was loaded with horse manure.

When the pessimist opened his box, he burst into tears.

"Why are you crying?" the father asked.

"Because my friends will be jealous, I'll have to read the manual before I can play with this, I'll constantly need batteries, and eventually it will get broken," sobbed the pessimist.

Then the optimist opened his box, and he whooped with joy.

"What are you so happy about?" the father asked.

"Well, daddy," the optimist twin replied, "there's got to be a pony around here somewhere!"

I shared this story with Sarita, and then, an hour or so later, in a totally different context, I commented, "Boy! I sure wish we could help ____ overcome his pessimism!"

"I don't think that's possible," she replied. "Remember the story of the optimist and pessimist twins?" . . .

What do you think? Can one train someone to become optimistic, to become--as some say--a "possibility thinker"? Or are these things totally innate?

How our temperament affects our ability to perceive

Thanks to Daphne Gray-Grant's latest Power Writing newsletter, I came across The Atlantic's What Makes Us Happy? featured in the June issue.

Fascinating article about a longitudinal study begun in the mid-1940s of 268 "normal" male Harvard grads (primarily from the classes of 1942-1944--including four who would go on to run for the U.S. Senate; one who served in a presidential Cabinet, and one who became president (John F. Kennedy). There was a best-selling novelist, too. . . .

Clearly--and one could guess this simply by knowing they were Harvard grads!--these weren't "average" men. But the longitudinal study revealed--and is continuing to reveal--rather fascinating (and potentially depressing) facts about them.

One that hit me hard: "As early as 1948, 20 members of the group displayed severe psychiatric difficulties. By age 50, almost a third of the men had at one time or another met [the current study director, Dr. George Vaillant]’s criteria for mental illness."

But this is not the primary reason I'm telling you about the story. My primary objective is to share the following:

Vaillant says his hopeful temperament is best summed up by the story of a father who on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, “Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.” The other boy runs to him and says, “Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!”

I've heard a version of this story before--though only about the son who got the horse manure.

I'd like to challenge you to think about how you view the things that come your way: Do you tend to see opportunity and possibilities? Or do you tend to see only the risks?

If the latter, may I suggest that you need to learn how to rebalance your perspective. The wise ones are correct: There really is opportunity all around. You "just" need to learn how to see it.

Oh, yes, you (and I) want to be fully aware of the risks. But after evaluating the risks and figuring out how to minimize their potential for damage, it really is good to pursue the opportunities.

That's my philosophy.

How bad are things, anyway? Pessimism, Optimism, and The Economist

I've had a pile of old clippings on my desk. I'm finally trying to deal with them.

The December 22, 2007-January 4, 2008 issue of The Economist included what I thought was a witty--actually, very encouraging--commentary on Americans' collective consciousness. Sometimes it takes an outsider to help you see yourself accurately.

The author, known as "Lexington" to his readers, describes a certain scene in Jim Carrey's "Dumb and Dumber":

Lloyd Christmas [Carrey's character] . . . falls in love with a classy beauty, Mary Swanson. In one scene he asks her the chances of “a guy like you and a girl like me” ending up together. The answer is “Not good”. “Not good like one out of a hundred?” asks Lloyd. “More like one out of a million,” Mary replies. Lloyd pauses for a moment, then shoots back, “So you're telling me there's a chance?”

"That," says the author, "is the American spirit" and why "Americans have traditionally been much more optimistic than Europeans, and happier too. They believe that people determine their own destinies rather than being the mere playthings of fate. They also believe that their children will have a better life than they do."

The problem is, says the author, right now Americans are believing too much pessimistic talk from the media:

The likes of Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs have transformed themselves into cable stars by ranting about cultural decay and “broken borders”. Patrick Buchanan's latest book is called “Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology and Greed are Tearing America Apart”. “We are on a path to national suicide,” he says. America is not just “coming apart”, but also “decomposing”.

There is certainly no shortage of bad news. But coming apart? Decomposing? The current issue of Commentary—a magazine hardly noted for its sunny disposition—contains an excellent article, “Crime, Drugs, Welfare and Other Good News” by Peter Wehner (a former senior White House aide) and Yuval Levin, which shows why Mr Buchanan is talking through his hat.

Both violent crime and property crime have declined dramatically since 1973. New York City will probably notch up less than 500 murders this year, the lowest since the early 1960s (the figure for 1990 was 2,262). Teenagers are cleaning up their act. Teenage drug use has fallen by 23% overall since the 1990s, and by 50% for LSD and ecstasy. Teens are drinking less, smoking less, having sex less and dropping out of school less. The birth rate for 15-19-year-olds has fallen by 35% since 1991. At 10%, the high-school drop-out rate is at a 30-year low.

Welfare reform is working. The welfare caseload has dropped by 60% since 1994. A series of social evils—overall poverty, child poverty, child hunger—have all decreased. Employment figures for single mothers have surged. The number of abortions fell from over 1.6m in 1990 to fewer than 1.3m this year. The divorce rate is at its lowest level since 1970. Education scores are up.

And so it goes.

Oh, yes, there is plenty of bad news, too. But--the kicker for me--let's look at America's history.

Americans have always had a vigorous tradition of pessimism, in counterpoint to the optimistic one. In 1819 John Adams worried about the duration of “our vast American Empire”. In 1948 Richard Hofstadter complained that “competition and opportunity” had gone into decline and that Americans were looking “wistfully back toward a golden age”. Much of today's pessimism may prove as unfounded.

And so, concludes our author: "Americans should rediscover the spirit of Lloyd Christmas, idiot though he was."

Ah! The Economist! I love how they report the news!