The One You Feed - Mini Episode- PItfalls of Positive Thinking

Episode Date: April 19, 2014

"Positive thinking can look an awful lot like old-fashioned denial"Jessica Lamb-Shapiro In this mini-episode I'm discussing my ambivalence on positive thinking. I cover:- Our Jessica Lamb-Shapiro interview- One of my Favorite quotes- The Stockdale Paradox- My former boss-Striking a balanceSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, it's Eric and I am back with another mini episode. And what I want to talk about this week is positive thinking. When is positive thinking a good idea and when are we taking it too far? And the guest we had on this week was Jessica Lam Shapiro. In her book she asked the question, when is it positive thinking and when does it become

outright denial? Her father was a self-help author and they talked, you know, they were very focused on positive thinking as she was growing up. But what they never were able to do was deal with the fact that her mother had committed suicide. It was something they could never talk about because it didn't fall into the realm of positive thinking, positive things. And so there clearly is a point that this can get, can go overboard. Our second guest ever on the show was Oliver Berkman, who wrote the book, The Antidote, happiness for people who hate positive thinking. So clearly, I have some some bias or concern against positive thinking. And yet at the same time,

I'm very cognizant of and I believe one of the most important lessons we can learn is that we create our reality based on what we're thinking about. Our interpretation, our perception of events is what creates our reality and ultimately creates the level of happiness and quality we get in our lives. So this is one of those things that we, one of the quotes that I put out in our Twitter stream a lot that I really like says, the pessimist complains about the wind, the optimist thinks that it will change, and the realist adjusts the sails. And that's about as good a summary as I can come up with. What I'm looking for is to be the realist in situations, maybe with a positive bent.

But being the pessimist or the optimist is not necessarily the right route. And there's a great story. I came across the story in the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, and it's a story about Admiral James Stockdale, who was the highest-ranking prisoner of war in Vietnam. He was in the prison camps for about seven years, I believe. He was in the prison camps for about seven years, I believe. He was tortured terribly. He was put into solitary confinement for huge amounts of time.

And in the book, Jim Collins is talking with him about the experience. And ultimately, Jim asks him, well, who didn't make it out of the camps? And Admiral Stockdale said, oh, that's easy, the optimists. And Jim was confused and said, and Admiral Stockdale said, oh the optimists, they were the ones who said we're going to be out by Christmas and Christmas would come and Christmas would go. Then they'd say we're going to be out by Easter and Easter would come and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving and then it would be Christmas again and they died of a broken heart. And then Stockdale looked at Jim and said, this is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline to

confront the most brutal facts of your current reality. And I think this is as good a explanation of the value of positive thinking and also where its shortcomings are. Because what he's ultimately saying is, look, I never gave up faith that I would prevail, that I would survive. However, I was also very real and very honest about the circumstances that I faced at that time. And I didn't deceive myself about

those. And I have a great example from my business career. I worked at a company and we had a CEO who had been in previous careers, a brilliant salesman. He was, everybody would say, one of the best salesmen they had ever met in their life. He believed that every phone call, the next one was going to be the big deal. And he believed that every meeting that he went into was the next big thing. And that is an extremely helpful thing if you're a salesperson who has to pick yourself up off the ground after rejection over and over.

And it helps you keep the enthusiasm to keep calling. However, in the role of a CEO, it's not good to be permanently locked into optimism mode. You have to be into a realism mode. Pessimism doesn't suit you either. You have to be realistic about where the company is, what the opportunities are, what the chances are, when they're going to happen, et cetera,

in order to be able to plan and forecast. And so that was a case, that was a clear example to me of positive thinking worked in this one situation, wasn't so positive in the other. And I think that it's the old idea of if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so to just blanket say that we should constantly only be thinking positive things denies the reality of our human condition and what's going on. So I think it's a fine line. Like anything, there's as much art as there is in science in figuring all that out.

Anyway, that's what's been on my mind this week. Again, we always appreciate you listening. We love to hear from you. You can email us, hit me on Twitter, whatever you like, and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks.