Confident optimism

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” - Helen Keller

I believe it’s largely impossible to achieve your full purpose and productivity unless you are optimistic about the future. Failing to visualize a motivating future inhibits your ability for original thinking and even degrades your mental and physical wellbeing.

This idea may sound odd coming from someone who thinks there’s a ~30% chance that humanity will fail in the transition to a superintelligent economy.

However, there is a multitude of positive effects:

• Expectations of success and failure are often self-fulfilling; if you aren’t optimistic, you’re more likely to fail.
• Being creative about the right solutions requires a positive vision of the future.
• An optimistic vision is essential to building teams, as it helps your collaborators in buying into a shared vision.
• Mental and physical health is associated with optimism, and positive visions of the future make you significantly more optimistic.
• And at a basic level, you also just become a nicer person to associate with.

What do I mean by confident optimism?

From sports psychology, it seems that the stronger your vision of success, the higher the likelihood you have of actually succeeding. There’s even a whole book dedicated to this idea applied more broadly.

This is evident among top performers in sports, with pre-game visualization of success as a key strategy for people such as Serena Williams and Viktor Axelsen. Why should engineering, impact, and research be any different?

While the visualization of success may differ among individuals, having a clear vision of what the future entails fundamentally brings clarity to the present, as you can see beyond any immediate failures or successes.

Unfortunately, this is not taught in technical education at any level. Instead, we are taught to be detail-oriented, narrowly focused, and skeptical. This approach is not conducive to building an ambitious, broadly scoped, positive vision of the future.

So as knowledge workers, engineers, and leaders, we’ll have to rebuild our ability for optimism and acquire this superpower. While overconfidence is misplaced, confident optimism will never be.

Build a positive future

So, I hope you’ll join me in creating a positive perspective on our shared future and build confident optimism¹. It will likely make you more productive, better at seeing the big picture, and improve your well-being.