What Exactly is Optimism?
Toward the end of every year, Pantone Colour Institute, the global authority on color in fashion and design, announces the 'Colour of the Year' for the 12 months ahead. To arrive at the selection, Pantone’s color experts scour the world looking for the most impactful and influential trends in art, tech, design, travel, and fashion that would set the stage for the seasons ahead.
However, after the incredibly grim and difficult year that was 2020, Pantone unveiled not one, but two independent colors for 2021.
In a statement on their website, they explain that the two colors of grey (Ultimate Gray) and yellow (Illuminating) "come together to create an aspirational color pairing, conjoining deeper feelings of thoughtfulness with the optimistic promise of a sunshine-filled day.”
Today, you, me, and everyone else in this world is seeking a sense of hope. We’re all searching for ways to fortify ourselves with the energy, clarity, and will to carry onward in spite of all the continued uncertainty.
We’re searching for a sign to remind us that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We’re searching for an aspiration that would allow us the freedom to indulge in the comforting feeling that everything is going to be okay—that soon, the murkiness will dissipate, the mud will settle, and the water will clear.
What we need right now, then, is optimism. Not positivity, but optimism—the foundational belief that if we put in the effort and resiliently work together, the future can be brighter than forecasted today. What we need is optimism because optimism is essential to the human spirit. As Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director of Pantone Colour Institute explains:
“The union of an enduring Ultimate Gray with the vibrant yellow Illuminating expresses a message of positivity supported by fortitude. Practical and rock-solid but at the same time warming and optimistic, this is a colour combination that gives us resilience and hope. We need to feel encouraged and uplifted, this is essential to the human spirit."
What you need to maneuver through a world of uncertainty is a sense of optimism—an attitude characterized by hope and confidence in a positive future. Truth is, optimistic attitudes are linked to a number of benefits, including better-coping skills, lower stress and anxiety levels, better physical health, healthier relationships, and higher motivation and resilience when pursuing your goals.
A study in the Clinical Psychology Review reveals that “higher levels of optimism have been related prospectively to better subjective well-being in times of adversity or difficulty; there is evidence that optimism is associated with taking proactive steps to protect one's health.” In her book, The Optimism Bias, neuroscientist Tali Sharot echoes the same conclusions:
“It is not just that healthy people are more optimistic, but optimism can enhance health. Expecting our future to be good reduces stress and anxiety, which is good for our health. Researchers studying heart attack patients have found that optimists were more likely than non-optimistic patients to take vitamins, eat low-fat diets, and exercise, thereby reducing their overall coronary risk. A study of cancer patients revealed that pessimistic patients under the age of 60 were more likely to die within eight months than non-pessimistic patients of the same initial health, status, and age.”
It’s crucial, however, not to confuse optimism with the toxic positivity of modern-day society. Positivity is saying that things are good even when they're not. It’s like saying your business is flourishing when in reality it’s deep in the red or that you’re feeling great when you clearly can’t get yourself out of bed in the morning. Truth is, toxic positivity is delusional and destructive because it blinds you from the reality of what is.
Optimism is different. Optimism is about being hopeful about the future, even when the present seems woefully negative. It’s about working through your negative emotions—instead of ignoring them—to better understand what they’re trying to tell you. Optimism is about transcendence, not suppression.
Optimism is about acknowledging the troubles of today, while also giving yourself permission to hope, even if you feel extremely anxious, restless, unhappy, or fearful. It’s not about ignoring your negative feelings about the crisis at hand, but about finding a way to keep them from overwhelming you.
Optimism sounds like this:
I’m struggling to find the motivation to focus and do my work and I know it’s making me anxious. Maybe these emotions are trying to tell me something. What is it? And how can I use this knowledge to better cope and grow?
Honestly, this business failure is so hard for me to swallow, but I know it has taught me a lot. So what can I learn from this experience?
I’m not too great at this, but I know that I have what it takes to get better, so I’m willing to stick with it because I know I will improve.
Yes, this situation sucks! It’s terrible! But we can figure a way out of it. I’m confident we can!
In this article, we’re going to explore what it means to be an optimist and how a simple shift in the way you interpret your current events can help you become more of an optimist and create a massive difference in the way you live your everyday life.
What it Means to be an Optimist
Optimism is essential to the human spirit. In fact, optimism is rooted in the cognitive evolution of our species that dates back to 70,000 years ago.
In Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, author Yuval Noah Harari, explains that what set Homo Sapiens apart in their evolution as a species was in their unique ability to construct fiction through the use of our language.
Fiction enabled us to imagine things that do not yet exist.
Many animals and human species could previously use language to communicate danger “Careful! A lion!”, but thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo Sapiens acquired the ability to leverage language as a means to paint an imaginative picture: “The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.”
“An imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world… It gives Sapiens immense power because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work toward common goals,” writes Harari. And what is optimism other than an empowering imagined reality of a better future that we choose to believe in, and work for, today?
This concept of an imagined future is also echoed in Tali Sharot’s The Optimism Bias, where she argues that optimism may be so essential to our survival that it is hardwired into our brain:
“Optimism starts with what may be the most extraordinary of human talents: mental time travel. That is, the ability to move back and forth through time and space in one’s mind. To think positively about our prospects, it helps to be able to imagine ourselves in the future. Although most of us take this ability for granted, our capacity to envision a different time and place is critical for our survival. It allows us to plan ahead, to save food and resources for times of scarcity, and to endure hard work in anticipation of a future reward… It keeps us moving forward, rather than to the nearest high-rise ledge. To make progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities, and not just any old reality but a better one; and we need to believe that we can achieve it. Such faith helps motivate us to pursue our goals.”
In 1942, Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was arrested with his entire family and sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Over the course of three years, Frankl was moved between four concentration camps where he witnessed firsthand the atrocities of the Holocaust. And yet, through his suffering, Frankl found meaning and purpose—a will to live.
The thought of reuniting with his wife and family and the goal to complete his manuscript that was confiscated and destroyed in the camps were the two pillars upon which his optimism weighed.
It was this hope that allowed him to survive. It was this belief in a more beautiful future that quenched his will to carry onward through his suffering and eventually publish his book, Man’s Search For Meaning.
In 1963, on the day of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin Luther King Jr. did not stand on that podium and voice a fragile vision that he thought was impossible. No. He was incredibly adamant and firm when he declared that “I have a dream,” because he believed it to be possible.
Martin Luther King Jr. believed in an alternative reality where racial injustice ceased to exist. His optimism for a better future thrust him forward and gave meaning to his struggles. Viktor Frankl believed in an alternative reality where he would return home to his family and help people overcome tragedy through his work. His optimism for a better future propelled him onward and fortified his will to sustain the fight for his life.
It’s the intersection of this innate human cognitive ability to imagine realities that do not yet exist coupled with the human capacity to creatively transform life’s negative events into something positive or constructive that forms the basis of optimism. An optimist, then, is someone who consciously chooses to adopt an attitude that he or she can make the best of any given situation, no matter how tragic the situation is.
How to Become More of an Optimist
At this point, you might be thinking: But how can I be optimistic when my world has been flipped over? How can I imagine a positive outcome in the future when my present is so grim and difficult? How can I be hopeful when I feel hopeless?
Well, there is a way.
According to positive psychologist Martin Seligman, “the basis of optimism does not lie in positive phrases or images of victory, but in the way you think about causes.” As he writes in his book Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life: “Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.”
Why is that?
The answer circles back to what psychologists refer to as your explanatory style: How you mentally explain the things that happen to you and the events of your life. And whether you tend to be more of an optimist or more of a pessimist can often be revealed by your explanatory style.
Optimists explain desirable events in terms of personal, permanent causes. They believe that they played an active role in creating those outcomes and that just because something good happened today, doesn’t mean that there will be less of it in the future. When it comes to undesirable events, they perceive them as external, temporary causes: “I was unlucky today, but that’s okay, I’ll have better luck next time.”
Pessimists entertain the exact opposite explanatory style. They personally blame themselves for bad events and perceive it as something pervasive: “Of course the publisher rejected my proposal—I’m a terrible writer” or “they didn’t give me the promo. I know I’m never going to get a promotion, ever!” And when something good happens, pessimists tend to attribute it to luck and see the outcome as an isolated temporary case—a fluke.
So, the way to optimism is quite simple really. Change the way you think about what you experience in life. Change the way you explain things to yourself. Dim the voice of your inner critic and practice more gratitude and self-compassion:
When something good happens, remind yourself of how you played an active role in delivering that outcome and believe that similar things can unfold and spill onto other areas of your life: “I got this promotion because I was lucky” becomes “I got this promotion because I worked hard this year, I’m good at what I do, and I fully deserve it.”
When something bad happens, consider for a moment that there were other stakes at play that were outside your control and that one bad outcome doesn’t define who you are; search for the lessons it taught you, and explore the areas in which you can now grow because of that experience: “My startup failed because of me; I made terrible decisions and I’m a failure” becomes “my startup was an incredible learning experience; I made some mistakes, I had some wins, some things didn’t go my way, but now I know that I’m much more likely to succeed next time around.”
How you perceive and explain experiences to yourself underpins the way you understand and make sense of them. So if you want to become more optimistic, your objective isn’t to imagine a bright future just yet, your objective is to reevaluate your current situation and see it in a different light.
Make it a habit to challenge your negative self-talk and replace pessimistic thoughts with more emphatic and empowering ones. Train yourself to think that way and you will reconnect with the natural optimist that is you.
As per the words of Viktor Frankl:
“If it [suffering] is avoidable, the meaningful thing to do is to remove its cause, for unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic. If, on the other hand, one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude… Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
So, What Exactly is Optimism?
People usually confuse optimism with positivity. Sure, they intersect, but they’re not the same. Optimism is about unearthing positive meaning in negative events—it’s a form of resilience. And the way to do that is to draw on positive emotions in times of stress in order to better cope with the negative emotions at hand. So, optimism is about finding peace within the positive and the negative.
Optimism is a process of rising and returning.
Optimism is faith.
As we’ve explored above, it’s rooted partly in our imagination and partly in our interpretation. It arises from the imagined realities of the future that we construct in our minds and it circulates back to the present circumstances and how we explain them to ourselves.
Optimism is a mix of imagination and interpretation.
So optimism is both, a philosophy and an attitude.
It’s a philosophy in how we interpret the events that happen in our everyday life. It’s an attitude in how we carry ourselves forward.
It’s simple and practical:
Choose to believe in a more beautiful future and you will begin to see the possibility of it. Choose to do the work for it and you will begin to see your progress through it. Choose to focus on what you can control and to only seek solutions to arising problems and you will begin to see just how resourceful you can really be. And choose to love more than you fear, and to be grateful and accepting for all that once was, already is, and soon, will be, and you will begin to see the divine beauty in every little thing.
That’s what the optimistic spirit is all about.
Optimists Live by This Mantra: “Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing.”
At the end of the day, I cannot tell you what your future will look like, but I can tell you that your freedom to imagine all that it could be is as boundless as the ocean is deep and blue. Because seeing is not believing, but believing is seeing.
So allow your imagination to wander with wonder. Allow it to believe in the light so it can see the light. Allow it to touch it. To wrap its arms around it and dance with it. For the light is hope, and optimism is simply believing that that very light is rightfully yours to seize and embrace.
The way I see it, optimism is simply choosing to believe that the future can still be beautiful and then willfully working today to manifest that future.
You begin walking the path of an optimist the moment you allow yourself to see all possibilities of what could be, even when there is no validation for them today. And as you continue walking, optimism will nourish you and sustain you.
Like your breath, it will fill you with energy and cleanse you of tension, and weave along with it a sense of meaning and fortitude into the very fabric of your everyday life. But you only become an optimist when you begin to intentionally align today’s actions with that hope for a better tomorrow.
Because it’s not only about imagining, believing, and seeing, it’s also about toiling in the language of labor and doing the work that will get you there. It’s not only about choosing a set of colors that make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, like gray and yellow, it’s also about picking up a paintbrush and stroking the canvas that is your life with a splash of faith, love, action, and enthusiasm.
It’s about finding peace within the positive and the negative.
It’s a process of rising and returning.
And that’s the optimistic promise of a sunshine-filled day.