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Making Yourself Miserable to Succeed?
PeterAitch writes "Nature is reporting that expecting the worst - emotional cushioning - does not usually make you feel any better when you flunk or flop. The reported study indicates that you are just making yourself miserable. On the flip-side, people who are anxious are more likely to motivate themselves better to prepare for the forthcoming ordeal - defensive pessimists. Those with a generally sunny outlook on life expect to succeed and tend to deny responsibility when they perform badly."
Is it just me, or is science starting to do not much more than gather statistical confirmation for the evident facts of life? I mean, anyone can tell that this is how it is; does it matter that we know with what confidence level each trope covers its portion of the behavioral spectrum?
So they think that it sucks to think you're going to fail unless it makes you anxious enough to study.
How do they get to making that leap when the study they did didn't afford people an opportunity to prepare in a way that they'd be able to perform better?
That whole thing sounded like they were taking what they learned -- the concept that if you think you can't, you can't -- and appended to it their own thoughts, unrelated to the study, to make people feel better.
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I, for one, welcome our happy, upbeat, responsibility-denying overlords! May they ever smile at whatever disaster unfolds before them! They don't need to avoid any prophesies of doom - they can embrace them and enjoy the support of all they bring with them into an unknowable oblivion. Hooray!
It's not pessimism if you WANT the world to end!
[/insanity]
Really though, this article reads much akin to a classic story of political gamesmanship. People generally would rather be lead to a horrific war on words of false hope than actually deal with the uncertainty of complex politics. Labelling optimism and pessimism as stark good or bad is a misleading guide to live your life - one should rather feed one's emotions as they need to, while striving to look at reality as clearly as one can. It'll never be an easy game to play, but it's easier to improve one's outlook through honesty than many would suspect.
Ryan Fenton
I agree with "hope for the best" — as the article says, people who expect bad things to happen are just making themselves miserable, without actually gaining anything from it.
I certainly don't agree with "expect the worst", that's exactly what's wrong. One must be prepared for the worst, not expect it. That is, you must think about the worst-case scenario and how to handle it instead of being foolishly optimistic and not worrying about it at all, but that does not mean you must actually believe that the worst-case thing is what will happen. The best state to be in is "I feel everything will turn out well (but if it doesn't, then I'm prepared for that too)."
(And as for "take whatever comes", you don't really have a choice there, do you?
I feel that this applies to life in general.
:-)
For example: The first time I moved out of my mothers basement, age of 16, I did not have a job. I would do web development, PC Repair, etc on the side while still trying to make it through high school. I found that the first two months were terrible. Around then I was literally crying myself to sleep due to stress. But, I found that this stress motivated me to be more productive, and allowed me to set and achieve higher goals. Around mid-month 3, I managed to make near $3000 in 2 weeks. Which is absolutely amazing, concidering I live in a small town, Saskatchewan, Canada. I found that this was a huge confidence boost. A couple months later I found a new apartment with a roommate, to help keep bills lower, etc. Because I didn't have to pay as much, I felt like I wasn't achieving as much as I should have. I started to make less and less money due to, well, laziness.
Moral is: Stress + Bills == Desire to work and achieve goals
The difference is that the Despair guy is also arguing that executives should crush the dreams and souls of their subordinates- so that they'll expect less from the corporation. (He's even releasing instructional videos about how to do that now- which I think my own boss may be watching and implementing...)
Somehow I think it's better to be intrinsically pessimistic than to be turned into a miserable wretch by someone else...
One thing that I've noticed is that computer programmers often come off as being "negative" but I think this is a mischaracterization. A programmer by nature, seeks to "find bugs" and this mentality manifests itself in a way where we constantly look for things that are wrong to correct them. This doesn't always work well interpersonally. I've been accused of being negative, when I consider the act of finding problems and fixing them to be a very optimistic, positive practice. The problem is, your average person has a severe aversion towards being made aware of his/her mistakes or ways in which things could be improved. At least in the business world, the value of criticism can ultimately be qualified, but interpersonally, it's a much more difficult, more complicated process that often backfires.
I think people confuse criticism with negativity too much. You can anticipate something going wrong in both a productive and non-productive way, and many don't note the distinction. In one scenario you're preparing for every contingency; in another, you're making excuses for failure. But there's a profound difference in the way people deal with these situations.
In my experience, many tech people are profoundly positive and hopeful. However, they achieve this degree of self confidence via a process of identifying and subsequently solving problems. Along the way, this appears to an outsider as being negative, but it's a very optimstic process.
Unfortunately being critical is taboo these days. Nobody wants to be told they're doing anything wrong, yet we still want everything to be perfect, so people who anticipate and adjust for potential failure are the ones that actually make things work, but nobody wants to be around during the process it seems.
Seligman is one of the more brilliant psychological researchers working today. Learned Optimism is an extension of his earlier work on learned helplessness.
If your goal is to be happy, then not blaming yourself for you failures is a pretty decent tactic. If you tend to believe that causes of your failure are external, temporary, and specific to the incident, then you tend to feel good about yourself, and continue to take risks. If you feel that the causes of your failure are internal, permanent and generalized, you will stop taking risks, and become depressed.
Seligman himself said it best. "Stupidity abides" - if you believe that you are too stupid to get a job, you'll stop trying, and become miserable. If you blame the job market - well, the job market changes. You'll keep trying, and be happier about it
I when I am about to enter into a stressful time, such as a speech, I imagine the worse possible thing happening but I also imagine myself smiling and feeling calm during this disaster. this usually prepares me and it is never as bad as I imagine it to be - I believe I got this from the dalia lama - but I could be wrong - QA K