Hard Optimism

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This is the new book by Price Pritchett, whom I hadn’t come across before. Pritchett runs a consultancy which works with large companies on the innovation and leadership fronts.

Hard Optimism is a pretty short book, about 120 pages, and details 12 principles of maintaining an optimistic mindset. The theory behind this is that those with an optimistic mindset live longer and achieve more compared with their pessimistic counterparts. So far, so familiar.

However, Pritchett contends that rather than optimism and pessimism being a single scale with polar opposites, there are actually two scales, one for optimism and one for pessimism. At any given moment, we can measure how optimistic and how pessimistic we are. This makes sense to me on the basis that I can consider the same thing and see how things would turn out if everything goes well, but also how things might turn out if everything goes wrong.

Pritchett also covers an area that I found particularly interesting: that of hope.

Most of us make the mistake of counting on hope to “just happen”. We don’t consider it a mental discipline that can be practiced. The schools didn’t teach us that this is a skill we should develop.

Pritchett points to a few pieces of research that indicate how hope can play a role in success, such as a study of college students where their level of hope proved to be a more accurate predictor of college grades than SAT scores. Not perfect perhaps, but still interesting to me. He goes on to state that hope is “an act of mental focus”, and that by developing it through repeated practice our attention is drawn to the positive aspects of your life. The implication of this being that you will take advantage of this positivity to build upon your successes. Now, that doesn’t sound all that different from the other theories of positivity, but hope is a slightly different way of framing it and one which I think might be worth experimenting with.

If you’re in the market for such a book, I’d recommend this one. At the very least, it does a very good job of summarising the research done by people like Martin Seligman and Mihaly Cikszentmihalyi.

Tags: bookreview, books, personaldevelopment