An earlier version of this article first appeared in The Positive Economist Bulletin in May/June 1994. Another version of it is scheduled to be delivered to a conference of economists and financial advisors in September this year.
To my friends I'm known as an upbeat person -- annoyingly so sometimes, because I usually refuse to let them wade in worry. A lot of them and many of my readers have asked me how I stay so upbeat, year after year. Here are some personal tips for gaining and keeping a positive outlook on life, especially in the face of the onslaught of the Zoom Doom media.
So when people complain to you, you should eventually stop them tactfully and ask, "But what good things happened?" You'll be thunderstruck by how many positives they can recall if you press them. This "miraculously" enhances your objectivity and theirs. It widens your scope of inquiry, bringing out positives that would otherwise be ignored. It also stops the moaners from dragging down your mood. And the dedicated complainers usually stop bothering you. They know it's no fun to be with someone who won't commiserate.
For instance, a Wall Street Journal story a few years back was headlined, "Productivity Slipped Slightly In First Quarter." Because productivity was up at a record pace for the year, this sounded bad; perhaps foretelling recession. Yet halfway through the story, it said manufacturing productivity, a much more important index, screamed up at a nearly 5% rate -- and durable goods productivity almost twice as fast!
This is typical of the media. I call it the "bloody hook" technique. The hook catches your interest by being dour. But the dourness is frequently offset twice over by positives in the rest of the story. TV is especially notorious for this technique. What's the remedy?
You can't change the networks, but you can learn to mentally edit the news as you go. You can do this with a standing order to your mind to catch the brighter elements of stories. There is another way to help, closely related -- which is point three.
To avoid being caught in this hail of Armageddonish garbage, you should consider teaching yourself to cock a skeptical eyebrow at anything that smacks of what I call, "big, bad, and boom." Big, bad, and boom happens; it's true. Airliners are bombed. Tornados strike. Good people die. Wars occur. But in this nation, it happens far less commonly than the media and the pushers of superpessimism would have you believe -- at least when compared to the positive that happens but goes unreported. Consider:
There is pollution and disease; but lifespans are still extending. There are economic impediments (mainly government); but both productivity and the U.S. share of world output are rising, as are average American living standards. There are too many taxes; but we are among the lesser taxed of major nations. There is regulation; but we are a nation that is skilled at circumventing irrational regulations. There is a flake in the White House; but there is a wonderful system of checks and balances in America, a system which helps dampen the power of even very bad leaders.
In the course of building files for stories in The Positive Economist Bulletin and The Objective American, one useful technique I've devised for reading magazines, newspapers, Internet offerings, books and so forth is this: I scan the headlines or table of contents and check off those items which have a positive cast. I make myself -- after practice, you'll say "let" not "make" -- read those first. Go for the inspiration of hope before the perspiration of fear. It's not your duty to be dreary first or most of the time. Reprogram yourself to absorb the fun stuff first and most of the time. You'll be surprise d at how well this alone helps you to be skeptical of the Triple Ds, how much less attractive the bloody hook looks.
My favorite category of positives -- particulary when fighting a Zoom Doom media -- is answers. Answers. Mainly I look for examples of how rational people have solved problems; examples of people prevailing against so-called lousy odds.
Privatization is a great one for this sort of positive. The amount of deregulation in the last 20 years is astonishing. Almost no one predicted it, not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Who, for instance, would have thought that most of Latin America and the Far East -- let alone Eastern Europe -- would even begin to embrace free markets to the degree that has occurred? Not many! And while one can fault its human rights record, China alone, by essentially deregulating since 1978, has freed the economic lives of over a billion people, a sixth of the world's population!
In your search for positives, don't forget personalities. Personalities can inspire. For instance, take Bret Schundler, the Republican young free marketer mayoral candidate who ran in a city with only 6% Republicans, facing a huge, decades-old Democratic machine, and won in a landslide! That's what happened in mid-1993, when Schundler took 68% of the vote in socialist Jersey City, wiping out his opponent, party hack Louis Manzo.
To me, stories like this are inspiring. It's like Clint Eastwood knocking off a movieful of bad guys. It's like a U.S. Olympic team winning an unexpected gold medal. It gives me courage to keep fighting against heavy odds. It reminds me that one should never overestimate the power of evil. Under its lizard skin, evil is essentially impotent -- just as Ayn Rand often said. Evil can be beaten by people with energy and good ideas and perseverence. It happens in America a lot more than you might think. But you have too look for it. The Zoom Doom media still haven't figured out that there's a huge market for the positive, so they're not going to make it easy on you. You have to assert yourself. To that end...
The point of stocking an arsenal is twofold: (a) to be able to back up what you say and just as important (b) to regularly reaffirm to yourself the scope of the positives that exist. Keeping a record, a "positive file," objectifies the optimistic. If you neglect the effort to categorize and recall positives, at least in some simple form, you'll forget most of them, especially in the heat of battle when you most need them! That will keep you at the mercy of the Zoom Doomers' minions, letting the sheer volume of their pessimistic facts overwhelm your positives. Your written-down positives are your army of facts, standing behind you to help.
Getting positive is a process of self-persuasion. It entails several factors.
First, it means persuading yourself that positives are important to being rational and objective -- more important than negatives, considering that evil is a vacuum-filler. As many have said, evil ultimately gets nowhere on its own; if you don't feed it, it dies.
Second, getting positive means convincing yourself to give up your addiction to the drama of the negative. It means doing a devilishly difficult thing -- setting your own, dramatically optimistic standards for what should go into your upstairs computer, rather than letting an often gloomy cadre of cultural elitists do it for you. They will, you know. At least the smarter ones. They have personal agendas. They know that if they can make you feel bad enough, it's more likely you'll give up and give in to their gloom. Demoralizing the enemy is an ancient technique -- on both the military and intellectual battlefields.
Third, getting positive means valuing the power of creation over destruction. You can't build a shining new world without being commited to creation. You can't build anything without being positive about what you're doing. You must have the courage to act as though what you want to create is possible. Of course, this presumes that you've reasoned it through and that what you want can, in fact, be created. True, sometimes in the depths of doomish facts, creation of a program, product, or service feels impossible. But it may only feel that way. Believing in the positive value of creation is itself a generator of more positives, of ways of seeing opportunities and strategies which were previously hidden, filtered out by our negative mindsets. If we let ourselves wallow in negatives, we can't spot the scope of what's actually possible. We cloud our vision. We set our mental programs for failures and impediments instead of for success and the sweeping aside of obstacles.
I find that setting my mind for positives is like setting it for work. If I don't get in a working frame of mind, I'll be thinking about vacation, movies, books, sex, rebuilding my greenhouse, killing my squawking parakeet, or dozens of other useful things. (Just kidding about the bird!) The mind needs self-discipline in order to be positive, just as it needs it in order to focus on anything else. Unless we are lucky, we aren't taught this in school, but its true -- a great secret of how to enjoy life and succeed.
Like any other form of focus, it takes effort; it requires practice. You can't simply declare one day, "From now on I'm going to be positive!" -- and have it automatically happen. It won't. That's like the old Sidney Harris cartoon where the scientist has a gargantuan series of numbers on a blackboard, points to a blank spot in the equation, and says, "And then a miracle happens!" You can't count on a miracle to make you into a positive person.
I like to state it this way: "You have to go to work at the positive factory." You have to do it every day. However, the interesting thing about the positive factory is that it is anything but humdrum or boring. The positive factory is a fantastically exciting place! Everything learned there makes you want to learn more. A positive outlook is not its own reward; nothing is. But it does produce rewards, and they are quickly apparent.
For instance, when I first started The Positive Economist Bulletin, it was a challenge to myself. I was a confirmed pessimist. I truly believed that a pessimist was "an optimist with more information." I didn't really believe there was a lot of positive news about the economy. However, I was tired of the negative. I thought it would be refreshing to hunt for better news, at least for awhile. Was I ever shocked! Once I became attuned to the positive, it flooded in. I found more than I ever imagined. I was so overwhelmed, I almost became depressed at the magnitude of what I'd missed. But the depression was fleeting. It quickly turned to elation as I realized I was beginning a grand adventure!
This takes a moment of thought, but most great creators and producers eventually learn the lesson. To do a good job, they must focus their time on moving forward. Their time is too precious to be wasted on things out of their control. They will, for instance, in fighting for freedom, be less likely to worry about changing everything and instead focus on changing something. Depending on position and influence, this will vary from person to person. But the positive person -- whatever his social standing or resources -- learns that he cannot stay positive if he takes on too much. If he tries, he will be overwhelmed and become depressed. So, as you focus more on the positive, as you practice seeking it and asserting it, you will find priorities naturally and more easily sorting themselves out. You will find it easier to avoid unproductive diversions and distractions.
To really understand, though, you have to try the tips listed in this presentation; you must put them into practice. The tips can't be "intellectualized" into existence. Positive living isn't goofy Pollyannaism. It's an acknowledgement that the positive, especially in modern America, is a powerful force, a motivator, a tool for real-world action. It cannot be said enough: the positive is creation-oriented, production-oriented, happiness-oriented. As such it is the more powerful part of the objective. The positve is worth living for.