Everyone has heard this self-help speech about optimism that being more hopeful about your goals, dreams, and ambitions will lead to greater chances of success in the outcome. What if I told you that this is the exact reason why you won’t achieve your goals?
The reason why people prefer to tout optimism as the beacon of success for any goal is that it acts as a guard against the anguish of our future. Optimism also acts as an indicator of those things we desire and, accordingly, pushes us toward them. Optimism is good as it has been shown to help people achieve their goals as per some research reports. It almost acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy, in the sense that if you believe then you can achieve. However, a lot of the optimism out there is misguided and not grounded in reality. This misguided optimism led to the 2008 market crash, overspending on several megaprojects, and increased debt burden taken by college students. This is called the optimism bias, first discovered in 1980, which is defined as the belief that one is more likely to achieve a positive event and less likely to face a negative event. One engages in more risky behaviour and foolish choices with regard to their health. Optimism bias drives our decisions much more strongly than we might think and it’s time that we get a hold of it.
I personally suffer from optimism bias on a regular candid. Being an over-ambitious person and an overthinker is not an ideal combination. You regularly gravitate towards making impossible plans such as waking up at 7 am when you normally sleep at 2 am itself. You plan to study 4 continuous hours when you’ll end up studying only 1 out of those 4 because you’re tired from school. You’ll end up taking BSc psychology as a course for college thinking it’ll be a doable course but end up barely passing each coming exam.
Attempts to counter the optimism bias have shown mixed results. While trying to convince subjects who had bad habits like smoking regularly about the increased risks of dying from it, they became more convinced that they wouldn’t die due to the role of the optimism bias. Some tactics that can be used are to look at the issue as if you were an outsider. Check base rates which are statistics that give quantitative data to anchor our judgment. Another tactic that can be used is to do a post-mortem approach. This is especially useful in companies or in personal life. This involves one already imagining that they have failed to complete a project and then charting out all the possible reasons for that failure. Countermeasures are then suggested to avoid this failure. It’s similar to the stoic principle of premeditato mallorum, where one conceptualizes all the negative events that could possibly happen in one’s life and try to work towards avoiding them.
Optimism is an important determinant of success, but over-optimism is an even bigger determinant of failure. As Dale Carnegie used to say, “Prepare for the worst, hope for the best. The former makes you sensible. The latter makes you an optimist.”
References-
1. Carnegie, D. (n.d.). "Be a balanced optimist. Nobody is suggesting that you become an oblivious Pollyanna, pretending that..." - Dale Carnegie Quotes at A-Z Quotes. A-Z Quotes. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://www.azquotes.com/quote/602336?ref=poor-decisions
2. The Decision Lab. (n.d.). Optimism Bias. The Decision Lab. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/optimism-bias
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