Tom Gardner and Morgan Housel (The Motley Fool) recently published a LinkedIn article called, Why Does Pessimism Sound So Smart? (Especially When Things Are So Good.)

Here is the gist of it:

If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naïve and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad. If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur genius award or even the Nobel Peace Prize.

Part of the reason for this is that we, as humans, respond more strongly to losses:

There’s clearly more at stake with pessimism. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for showing that people respond more strongly to loss than gain. It’s an evolutionary shield: “Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce,” Kahneman once wrote.

The behavioural economic theory being referred to above is called Prospect Theory. I wrote about this back in the fall of 2013 and made the argument that Prospect Theory might explain why NIMBYISM is so common in city building. 

Change to our communities is perceived as risky. And in the face of these uncertain situations, we tend to place more emphasis on the potential losses (traffic, congestion, shadowing, and so on) rather than the potential gains (increased vibrancy, improved streetscape, creation of more housing, and so on). It’s human nature.

Having said all this, I show up here every day and try to make this blog a positive place on the internet. Sure, I make suggestions about things I think we should do, but I generally focus on them as opportunities. Hopefully that comes through, because I’m a big fan of optimism.

https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work.html

Earlier this week I watched the above TED talk called, The happy secret to better work. It’s only 12 minutes long.

In it, Shawn Achor argues that we’ve got it all wrong and backwards when it comes to our happiness. We constantly set (moving) goals and then tell ourselves that once we achieve those goals we’ll be happy.

We tell ourselves that once we get that degree, buy that new home, or secure that new promotion, that we’ll be happier. And I’m definitely guilty of that sometimes. I think many goal oriented people are.

But his argument is that if happiness sits outside of those moving targets, we’ll never be as happy as we could be. Happiness needs to sit within those goals. In other words, we need to focus on being happy today, not tomorrow.

But the other powerful thing about this approach is that greater happiness has been shown to improve productivity. So if you simply flip this equation, you’ll probably be not only happier but more successful.

At the end of last year, somebody told me that they were really enjoying my blog because of how positive I always seem to be about the future of cities and the world.

And that was honestly one of the nicest things to hear from a reader, because I truly believe that optimism, not pessimism, is what moves the world forward.

Tom Gardner and Morgan Housel (The Motley Fool) recently published a LinkedIn article called, Why Does Pessimism Sound So Smart? (Especially When Things Are So Good.)

Here is the gist of it:

If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naïve and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad. If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur genius award or even the Nobel Peace Prize.

Part of the reason for this is that we, as humans, respond more strongly to losses:

There’s clearly more at stake with pessimism. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for showing that people respond more strongly to loss than gain. It’s an evolutionary shield: “Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce,” Kahneman once wrote.

The behavioural economic theory being referred to above is called Prospect Theory. I wrote about this back in the fall of 2013 and made the argument that Prospect Theory might explain why NIMBYISM is so common in city building. 

Change to our communities is perceived as risky. And in the face of these uncertain situations, we tend to place more emphasis on the potential losses (traffic, congestion, shadowing, and so on) rather than the potential gains (increased vibrancy, improved streetscape, creation of more housing, and so on). It’s human nature.

Having said all this, I show up here every day and try to make this blog a positive place on the internet. Sure, I make suggestions about things I think we should do, but I generally focus on them as opportunities. Hopefully that comes through, because I’m a big fan of optimism.

https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work.html

Earlier this week I watched the above TED talk called, The happy secret to better work. It’s only 12 minutes long.

In it, Shawn Achor argues that we’ve got it all wrong and backwards when it comes to our happiness. We constantly set (moving) goals and then tell ourselves that once we achieve those goals we’ll be happy.

We tell ourselves that once we get that degree, buy that new home, or secure that new promotion, that we’ll be happier. And I’m definitely guilty of that sometimes. I think many goal oriented people are.

But his argument is that if happiness sits outside of those moving targets, we’ll never be as happy as we could be. Happiness needs to sit within those goals. In other words, we need to focus on being happy today, not tomorrow.

But the other powerful thing about this approach is that greater happiness has been shown to improve productivity. So if you simply flip this equation, you’ll probably be not only happier but more successful.

At the end of last year, somebody told me that they were really enjoying my blog because of how positive I always seem to be about the future of cities and the world.

And that was honestly one of the nicest things to hear from a reader, because I truly believe that optimism, not pessimism, is what moves the world forward.