I hate pessimists with fury. And “realists,” who are nothing more than pessimists still in the closet. I hate their collection of excuses to justify their mediocrity and to discourage those who dare to create new things.
The irony of hating is that it makes me hand over control of my emotions to the very people I hate. It’s a bad habit that shows how much I still have to mature.
“Prudence and skepticism are virtues,” they’ll say. And I agree, but only when paired with genuine intellectual curiosity and experiments that let you learn. The mission is to avoid paralyzing inaction at all costs.
“That idea’s been tried,” is the proud critique a pessimist levels at the naïve idealist who dares to dream of changing the course of the world. If you challenge them, they’ll defend it as intellectual analysis, informed by their vast experience.
“The problem is the system,” the realist explains to people trying to bring change. Their message lets you pin problems on an abstract mechanism of which they’re victims, never on things under individual control.
The crime of pessimists is dragging smart people into the abyss of inaction, crafting messages that make them feel part of an elite for discrediting other people’s ideas.
Assuming what you’ll do might fail is easy. Waiting for the ideal moment to act, risk-free, is the comfortable path. The reward is waking up one day and finding yourself surrounded by friends stuck in unsatisfying routines, where no one wants to see others achieve what they themselves could not.
Realism and pessimism protect each other to destroy the optimist at their most vulnerable moment: the instant they decide to act.
Pessimism is defeated with simple logic and probability. Your ideas are neither good nor bad until you test them. The best new ideas are, by definition, improbable crazy things. Otherwise, someone would have already made them real. Trying wrests victory from these intellectual vampires.
Pessimists believe this strategy of hopelessness is responsible. They think that dampening excessive optimism protects society from waste and tragedy. If it were up to them, humanity would be in a cave on the African steppe, terrified of facing the saber-toothed tiger.
The problem is that this is exactly what their ancestors did. Many humans today are the genetic heirs of cowards who chose to hide rather than fight. The brave were eaten. Evolution rewards survival.
For the pessimist, destroying optimism feeds them. The realist enjoys the status quo of indecision. Both follow sensible tactics: seeking full consensus, following processes, and studying feasibility with caution. That’s how they suffocate a brilliant mind before it learns that, to win, you must enjoy uncertainty.
But what do you do when you’re blocked by a sense of insecurity? Easy: take it seriously and calmly write down what’s the worst that could happen, mathematically and rationally.
A pessimistic mind will imagine ridiculous scenarios where you lose your life or harm many people. Now assign a realistic probability to each horror you come up with. It won’t surprise you that the number for each terrible option is close to zero.
What can actually go wrong, almost always, isn’t that bad and isn’t that irreversible.
If your ideas have a 50% chance of success, on the second attempt it’s 75% likely. By the fifth attempt, it’s already 97% likely. And with each attempt, learning something new makes your success even more inevitable.
The next calculation is to evaluate, if it goes wrong, how easy it would be to fix. Few things are as irreversible as our anxiety wants us to believe.
Hopelessness is nothing more than the justification of mediocrity. Every successful artist had decades of being ignored. Every successful company that came out of nowhere had years of failures and humiliation behind it. This very article was revised dozens of times—and it may be revised again in the future.
Etch this into your mind: in most cases, the worst that can happen is nothing.
There's a video where you explain something related to this topic, and it struck me. You have two options when working with pessimistic people: you can encourage them and get them to follow your pace, or you can get on their level. When the first option doesn't work, you can't save them, and all you have to do is look elsewhere. You can't afford to get infected.
Every successful artist had decades of being ignored. Every successful company that came out of nowhere had years of failures and humiliation behind it. ✨🔝