WHENEVER I’d hear someone faced with a dilemma say, “think positive,” it reminds me of an old friend of mine, Ronnie Lalas (God bless him), who likewise took that saying as if it were a Swiss pocket knife. In the past, I used to have a problem with that.
For one, I can’t really imagine how one could “think positive” when the brain’s already in full panic mode and thinking straight is even hard to do. Just too abstract for me. In all coolness, he would shoot back to say, not in so many words, “Reverse whatever’s negative and work your way up to its opposite.”
I recently reread a Simon Sinek interview where he said, instead of “adapting” a positive outlook, what we should actually be doing these days is to be optimistic.
Being an optimist, he said, is not the same thing as being a positive thinker. For one, having a positive outlook meant only choosing to recognize what’s good and refusing to acknowledge what is bad. If one looked closely, there’s so much pressure trying to stay positive when the backdrop is filled with so many negative things these days.
Meanwhile, he says that being optimistic is much like being inside a dark tunnel where you are seeing a light at the far end. Here, your focus is not necessarily on the tunnel itself, but on the light ahead.
In other words, while positivity prefers to only see the good, optimism is more holistic. It does not ignore the current predicament or problem. In the same way, optimism allows darkness and reality to exist, along with having good days and bad days.
This means that compared to positivity, it accepts the presence of setbacks in life and doesn’t sweep them under the rug.
Sinek says that if we say “be positive,” it means disallowing or not acknowledging setbacks in our reality.
To compare, being an optimist means accepting the nitty-gritty of any problem and aiming to surpass it. Later, as we slowly inch toward a solution, the step-by-step processes that we painstakingly construct become the end results of this.
I am reminded of someone who always reacted whenever I griped about the mega negas, saying that I should only think positive thoughts, as these will attract positive vibes. I hope this is a different thing altogether. Bad vibes, or bad things, or “negas” exist, mind you, and especially these days, they are real. Now, I Sinek-ly hope that I meet that person soon.
