Put on Your Rose-Colored Glasses

The world can be a hard, unforgiving and cruel place. Every day people are hurt and wronged. Every day mistakes are made that spiral out of control and ruin lives. Every day we are beat down by life’s uncontrollable uncertainties. Through this lens, seeing life’s glass half empty is more than understandable. Giving up would be justifiable.

But we don’t give up.

We are a species surviving and thriving in spite of these negative headwinds. Believing in ourselves and expecting the best no matter how many times we are hurt or wronged. Learning from our mistakes and making amends. Getting back up no matter how many times we are beat down. Trying again.

The glass is half full.

From the time we are babies, constantly falling and fumbling around, generally incapable of doing very much, we simply and intuitively keep trying. Even our success is intimately connected to our “failure”. Thomas Edison famously failed thousands of times in trying to invent the lightbulb, yet he kept trying. When asked about his failures he said, “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” And Michael Jordan (my personal favorite) gave us all a peek at how he approaches life in a poignant Nike ad towards the end of his career, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost more than 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over, and over, and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Keep trying.

So how do we do it? How do we keep on going when we are constantly beat down by a world uninterested in our success?

A Tale of Two Travelers

There’s a wonderful parable that cuts straight to the heart of this conundrum:

There was once a traveler who was walking from a village in the mountains to a village in the valley. As he walked along, he saw a monk working in a field, so he stopped and said to the monk, “I’m on my way to the village in the valley, can you tell me what it’s like?”

The monk looked up from his labor and asked the man where he had come from. The man responded, “I have come from the village in the mountains.”

“What was that like?” the monk asked. “Terrible!” the man exclaimed, “no-one spoke my language, I had to sleep on a dirt floor in one of their houses, they fed me some sort of stew that had yak or dog or both in it and the weather was atrocious.”

“Then I think that you will find that the village in the valley is much the same,” the monk noted.

A few hours later another traveler passed by and he said to the monk, “I am on my way to the village in the valley, can you tell what it’s like?”

“Where have you come from?” enquired the monk. “I have come from the village in the mountains.”

“And what was that like?” the monk asked. “It was awesome!” the man replied, “No-one spoke my language so we had to communicate using our hands and facial expressions. I had to sleep on the dirt floor which was really cool as I’ve never done that before. They fed me some sort of weird stew and I have no idea what was in it but just to experience how the locals lived was great and the weather was freezing cold, which meant that I really got a taste of the local conditions. It was one of the best experiences of my life.”

“Then I think that you’ll find that the village in the valley is much the same,” responded the monk.

Both travelers had the same experience, yet each came away with a radically different impression.

The second traveler — along with babies, Edison, Jordan and the whole of humanity — has a different perspective than the first. He has an optimistic perspective, and that makes all the difference.

Agency & The Optimism Bias

Human beings are born optimists. This Optimism Bias basically tells us that we are less likely to experience a negative event and/or more likely to experience a positive event than objectivity would allow. It is likely a natural outcome of our evolved ability to control and manipulate our environment. In order to connect these dots we need to veer off on a quick tangent and discuss the concept of agency.

— — —

Agency* simply means the ability to act in a given environment, consciously and with intention. The development of human agency goes something like this:

• While many animals have some degree of agency, the ability to build and use tools, especially complex tools, gives the human animal exceeding degrees of agency in the world. This is explained, in general, by the theory of associative learning.
• With control over outcomes, agency plays a key role in guiding attributions of responsibility. We are response-able thanks to our agency.
• The greater we perceive our ability to control the environment, which we better at every day, the more confident we are of our ability to execute our desired action(s) successfully.
• With increased confidence comes increased expectations of success. Confidence literally makes us optimistic.
• In sum: we have agency, which gives us confidence, which in turn makes us optimistic.

Agency tangent over. We return to our regularly scheduled optimism programming.

— — —

As I was saying, that we see the world with rose-colored glasses is as natural as our genetic desire to live on in future generations.

As I have organized the world of behavioral science, the Optimism Bias is another framing bias but, unlike Loss Aversion and Fairness, it is focused on the context of the self and the ego. More specifically, I include it with a group of biases I like to call the “But I’m Different” biases, such as Bias Blindness, False Uniqueness, and Illusion of Transparency, to name a few. You’ve read or heard about surveys where 80% or so of respondents rate themselves “above average”. That’s thinking that you’re different. That’s the Optimism Bias.

Over time, we are learning to better recognize our tendency towards optimism** and how to best manage it, and Behavioral Science is leading that charge. This is especially true for those instances where our optimism is unfounded and irrational, leading us into a variety of unnecessarily dicey predicaments. However, we don’t have to wait for Behavioral Science to educate us about our preference for seeing the glass half full, we’ve been telling each other for millennia.

“It’s always darkest before the dawn.”

Back in Mesopotamia, at the very birth of civilization, ancient Sumerians had a saying that captures the very essence of optimism:

• “Although the number of unhappy days is endless, yet life is better than death.”

Even they knew that no matter how bad things may seem, no matter how hard life knocks you down, it’s still better than death.

The bible, that great repository of ancient wisdom, teaches of optimism:

• “…the testing of your faith produces perseverance.” (NIV, James 1:3)

Consider this the gospel of “that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.

Way back in the 1600’s, in his book A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine and the Confines Thereof, English theologian Thomas Fuller coined the phrase:

• “It’s always darkest before the dawn”

According to Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, this is one of the great teachings of all myths. That there is always light at the end of the tunnel. That at the very bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. That only in the darkest moment is when the real message of transformation will come. He even goes so far as suggesting that darkness coming before the light may be interpreted as the resurrection of the Christ within each and every one of us.

And today we have a variety of colorful ways we emphasize the importance of optimism to one another:

• “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
• “When life give you lemons, make lemonade.”
• “Fall down seven times, get up eight.”
• “Keep your chin up.”

Bottom Line

Life of full of ups and downs, and there will be times when the world seems uninterested in your success. Times when you are hurt or wronged. Times when you make mistakes and the world as you know it teeters on the brink. Times when you are unjustly beat down.

When these times come — and they will — remember that things are what you make them to be. You can choose to see the glass half full or half empty. Either way you will be right.

If you choose to see being wronged as reason to give up, you will. If you choose to see a mistake you’ve made as the end of the world, that’s exactly what it’ll feel like. If you get knocked down and choose not to get back up and try again, there you are.

However, if you choose to look on the brighter side, if you choose to remind yourself that the sun will rise tomorrow, then you will embrace the courageous spirit of all those optimists that came before you. You may be wronged, but you choose to let it go. You may have made a mistake, but you learn from it and are better off for it. You may get knocked down, but you choose to get back up because you are an optimist.

So put on your rose-colored glasses. After all, they are the ones you were born to wear.

Notes:

*The development of human agency is argued to be directly correlated with the universal recognition of a higher power or ubiquitous intelligent agent acting on and in the world.

**To be fair, I would like to acknowledge the existence of a pessimism bias, as well. Basically, the pessimism bias is an overestimation of the probabilities and harmful effects of negative future events. However, while it is true that our brains are wired to pay more attention to the threats that we may live to see tomorrow, the pessimism bias is most common in depressed individuals and not necessarily in opposition to the more general optimism bias that is common to all people.