‘Defensive pessimism’, which focuses not on the best scenarios but the worst ones, might better prepare you for the future
Were Abraham Lincoln, the legendary US president, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russia’s greatest novelist, happy people? People who knew them testified that they were not - at least most of the time. Even beyond the borders of the US and Russia, both men have been universally acclaimed as successful leaders in their own fields. So why do so many people embrace such unhappy people?
"No element of Mr. Lincoln's character was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy,"That side of Lincoln was so obvious in the immediate aftermath of his presidential nomination by the Republican Party in 1860. "I'm not very well," heOn the other hand, Dostoevsky was not a writer, who pretended everything is rosy and bad things happen because of misfortune.
That brutal honesty helped make Lincoln and Dostoevsky into heroes for successive generations, who also needed to deal with ups and downs of their lives through disasters, wars, economic crises and psychological depressions. In the social media age, that approach might not be so popular, but British writer Oliver Burkeman’s book,almost echoes Dostoevsky’s argument.
Burkeman draws attention to the dangers of positive thinking: “Positive thinking, by contrast, is the effort to convince yourself that things will turn out fine, which can reinforce the belief that it would be absolutely terrible if they didn't.” Already some experiments conducted by management scholars showed that people who are tasked to fulfill certain goals are seen to be much less honest than people who are just told to do their best in terms of their report of given tasks, according to Burkeman.
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