The Only Real Science of Hope and "Optimism"

It's been a real juggernaut of personal growth technology lately for Men's Psychology Magazine, and we've diverted from the pure dating and relationship material for men for a few weeks (maybe we are overcompensating for the high-intensity programs about to happen in Berlin and London in the next few weeks - all about women, meeting them, communicating, body language, reading their behavior, attracting them, dating them, selecting them for fit to your life, deciding on girlfriends and even a wife if you so choose.) It's all at the LIVE EVENTS PAGE and yes, the Berlin training even includes free accommodations.

But the truth is, the systems and processes of personal growth in the MindOS Mastery course run so deep, you can literally make discoveries in your own life with it on nearly weekly basis.

I began developing MindOS over ten years ago, and to this day, I STILL discover new insights and practical tools from it in everyday life. Such was the experience of this past week.

In class, the question was, "Dr., What good is optimism? I'm sick of hearing about optimism! It's silly and stupid. Life sucks, and I'm insulted to hear any more about optimism."

He was right. His life DID suck, and it likely WAS insulting to mention the word, "optimism," to this man.

I got a view from his side tonight, at a benefit dinner. A "dating coach" was talking to me - a male - asking me how to teach women about dating and romance, and "is it different from teaching men? Since men like pickup lines and stuff, do you do the same thing to help women? Or is it more on how to be positive and awesome?"

This line of talk was so fraudulently, pseudo-optimistic, the optimism of this positive, optimistic dating coach made me resent the very concept of optimism. I was not at all optimistic that it was possible to teach the man anything about the psychoanalysis of feminine instincts, courtship or romantic educational process for their gender. It reminded me of how often I run into people who have taken certain courses, or read certain self-help materials that one could say are similar to "religious level intensity" about optimism, without real substance, or principles, or least of all, ACTION to better their lives. Things like The Secret and Law of Attraction and other markety-markety, positive affirmation stuff.  I call these, "Robot Optimists."

On the other hand, there are also pessimists who one could say have a religious intensity too, about being naysayers, contrarian, or even "haters" who take pride in being negative - they take on an actual identity I might call the "Rebel-Without-a-Cause" Pessimism you all know well from anyone on a chatboard or comment section not brave enough to go by a name other than "anonymous."

Instead, I just said, "Yeah, positivity. Cool," and was on my way as quickly as possible.

Back to the class...

I rarely talk about optimism or even use the word because it has been so overused, and made so empty by the self-manufactured, self-help industry. Takes away any practical usefulness, actually.

This man really wanted an answer, however. So I took the Socratic approach. I just kept asking him questions about why he wanted to know what good "optimism" could possibly be to him, what it really means, and if it is at all useful to a man whose life really DOES suck.

It's About the Future

The first thing that we realized is that this word we use, "optimism," is about the future, not the past or present - an assumption that whatever happened in the past, there is reason to believe that the future will go well, and whether or not that is an evidence-based point of view. One just knows, and acts as if the future will go well. Our man in question certainly did not have evidence that the future would be a good thing for him. Much to the contrary.

So it's no wonder that he did not count himself among optimists.

Instead of patronizing, talking about "keeping a stiff upper lip," or "seeing the silver lining" in every cloud, positivity, affirmations and the like, it was instead time to dig in to the concept of time, itself.

With the three-act play called life, at every moment - the first act as the past, the second as the present, and the unknown final act called the future - we had something objective and not objectionable to look at, finally.

This revealed four kinds of people as far as "expected life's story":

• Traumatized Pessimists - those with a "bad" past, expecting a "bad" future.

• Determined Optimists - those with a "bad" past, expecting a "good" future.

• Has-Been Pessimists - those with a "good" past, expecting a "bad" future.

• Silver-Spoon Optimists - those with a "good" past, expecting a "good" future.

If we were to dissect and analyze these four together, it will reveal quite a bit for you to sink your teeth into as far as personal growth.

Traumatized Pessimists

These are the guys who have had more than their fair share of negative things happen in their lives. Maybe it wasn't as simple as their fathers or mothers being alcoholic. They also came from the lowest of the the low levels of the economic spectrum. They ate ramen noodles for dinner in their formative years. Whether or not they did well in school, they also later couldn't manage to keep a job. Whether or not they managed to talk to women, they can't manage to keep a woman around as a girlfriend or wife.

In short, they are unlucky, and this may very well be the label they place on themselves - the act of which reminds us of the idea of "self-fulfilling prophesy," that their negativism held tight - and based on a past that wasn't their fault - also is the cause of their negative current behavior, attitudes toward themselves and other people, their logically negative actions that emerge from that, and the negative responses and feedback they get from the world.

Cognitive therapy for depression can do them a world of good, because interrupting this negative process at any step of the cycle - thought, feeling, action, response, or reaction - can interrupt this negative feedback loop of self-fulfilling prophesy.

Except in cases where they have given up letting the logical solutions they see have an impact in actually shifting or changing their behavior.

After all, it's hard for any thoughts, feelings or actions to even matter if one actually views their very identity as "unlucky."

Something more than mere optimism or "mind over mood" or logic is needed here.

They need new life's experience - call that, "luck" - and more... They need an explanation as to why it actually is possible for an unlucky person to become lucky "just like that."

Determined Optimists

By contrast, the hard-scrabble optimist strives to be more than anyone would have given them credit for. They have had a bad past. It's painful, and as a result they don't want to spend any time LIVING in the past. That leaves the challenging present, and the unknown future. They figure, "Why not wish for, dream, or assume the best for the future."

These people are among the most successful people in business, the arts, the professions, and even in the area of romance. There's certainly an aspect to them that has to do with gratitude and appreciation - and not of the manufactured, trite kind used by the "optimism robots." It's an experience of having a yardstick, a baseline measurement of what's good about life as measured against the really, truly bad.

There's more though. They're hungry.

I remember a phrase used by an office manager back in the days when I was a resident doctor (which means basically living in the hospital, doing work for very low wages.) She used to assign opportunities for residents to make a little extra money by doing extra on-call duty overnight. These were precious to us as residents, and there were only about eight or nine of them per month for a whole lot of us to fight for. They could make the difference between living in a studio apartment with a broken toilet versus a nice place where the mailman isn't afraid to deliver the mail.

She called us, "The Hungry." Only I didn't know that until I talked to her years after I graduated. She said, "I didn't want you to know that's what we called you at the time. You might not have done the work, or you might have thought ill of yourself."

That taught me a lot about motivation that no motivational guru ever could. I had lived it, and I knew she was right - I WAS hungry, running away from the destitute past, and also needed to not be aware of this hunger, or the fact that I was running away from the sadness of the prior years, nipping at my heels.

It's a necessary illusion, yet unlike many illusions, actually adaptive, strengthening, and beneficial to not only individuals, but society.

Why?  As you're soon going to see, the future is a more powerful thing to focus on than the past. We don't control the past, nor the future either... but at least we can take aim at a future goal.

Has-Been Pessimists

This kind of pessimist is not your typical one that we tend to hold in mind. We usually think of pessimists as reliably negative, even bitter, somewhat avoidant of other people - misanthropes - but not this one. These guys have numerous friends, often for many years running, and that is because life was once very, very good, and friends, aplenty because of that.

These are the guys who were high school quarterbacks on the winning side, dated the cheerleaders, drove the sports cars their wealthy fathers had given them on their seventeenth birthday, just before securing them admission to the best colleges, complete with a lucrative, no-labor summer job.

They like remembering this.

No, they love remembering this. And while they might not literally spend all their time in the past, they devote many of their expendable time daydreaming about those days, simply because by comparison, the present moment is nowhere near as perfect, memorable, or alive.

I remember the very strange experience of running into a new freshman student at university when I was a sophomore. He approached me from a block away, shouting my name, which was shocking given that only two years before, he had bullied me in high school. He had been the star basketball player of our school team, and while I was six foot four inches, he was at least four inches taller and far heavier and more muscular.

His friendliness was genuine but nervous, and was jarring as compared to my memory of the cruel, cutting insults, teasing, and harassment of the past that he seemed to not even recall.

Or maybe some part of him did recall this. Only now, merely a year later, he was no longer an active athlete, was of lower social status than one of the many he had bullied, and never had been very bright in the first place.

Life had already caught up with him, and at the young age of nineteen, the present was already comparatively not so good.

I wanted to get away from him as quickly as possible, but noted that it wasn't because I feared him anymore. It was something else. I felt bad for him actually, and on some level, feared ever becoming him.

However you want to look at it, these are "has-beens" - and while fun and friendly in their reveries about the "Glory Days" of the past, many of us avoid them because they remind us of frailty in ourselves. We know that our bodies will age, that we will one day, actually die. We know that most if not all things in life are temporary, and we do not like knowing this. The Has-Been Pessimist is a living reminder that all these things are true. We can literally see death walking behind them, very, very slowly catching up.

If we get too swept into their world, this is soon all we can see about life, because there is a trend happening from good days of the past to not so good days in the present. Then it's not a far stretch to extend the trend in our subliminal minds out to the point where life could be expected to be most certainly bad. And this logical (but not necessary) conclusion is the very thing they are avoiding with their war stories, and tales of glory.

We forget that one can age gracefully, can eat better, exercise and handle health problems. We forget that love is always around the corner, and around the corner from that could be children if you so choose - which is one way of living forever in what you pass down to them. We forget that while we will most certainly die, that we can die not just with dignity, but with satisfaction in a life well-lived, and a legacy left behind beyond children - in the fruits of our labors, in the career mission accomplished that we talk so much on in the Mature Masculine Power Program.

And we forget that life is never a straight line upward or downward, but a jigsaw pattern of good times and bad, which so often outside our awareness are connected to the decisions we make or could make if only we were to pay attention to the menu.

Which means that the past and future do not at all have a direct connection, except through the decisions we make in the present.

Silver-Spoon Optimists

This is the guy who says, "I was lucky to have good parents," or a good childhood, or advantages, middle or high class economic level - "born with a silver spoon in his mouth," or at the very least, mature, loving adults in his life.

The experience has been his most frequent emotional state, and it taught him to always expect love, money, friendship, and happiness to surround him. He behaves in a way that expects this to always be the case because it always was, and his self-fulfilling prophesy is a positive one. He smiles easily, makes more friends every day, says and does positive things, which cause positive reactions around him, and reward him back positively.

When there is a down-tick in life as there will always be here and there, he sees it as a strange aberration, leaping over it as a freak of natural life, and already looking to the next up-tick, which will also surely come.

While the Determined Optimist "makes his luck" through hard work, the Silver-Spoon Optimist is just plain lucky no matter what he does.

Luck is a wonderful illusion, and because of self-fulfilling prophesy, likely a beneficial illusion - so if there is a weakness - an Achilles Heel of the Silver-Spoon Optimist - it would have to be that with a lasting tragedy or a challenge which will have need of consistent and disciplined effort to solve, they can be taken by surprise. They can even be seduced by passivity and sloth.

And so it goes that we know some men of wonderful upbringings in which there is a steady course to their lives - sometimes even a boring one... but others who suffer a sudden decline when there is a major transition: going off to school, or into the workplace, or into an unvetted marriage that ends in divorce, or into a health problem caused by too much carefree fun, and not enough discipline.

But life goes on, and when they do have children, the surprises, declines and falls they suffer can lead to those children being "hungry" - so the cycle starts again.

The "Left-Brain" Invents the Past and the "Right-Brain" Invents the Future

Time doesn't exist for rocks, or at least not in a sense of consciousness of time. But it does for us - that continuum from past to present to future. It is in the MindOS Mastery Program where we cover the nature of two kinds of intellectual processing, which have been described as "Right-Brained" thinking and "Left-Brained" thinking.

In the processing of data that you could envision as being "memory," psychoanalysts have described two forms, called "declarative memory" (facts, such as your multiplication tables) and "procedural memory" (experiences, such as that of being a quarterback, or the motions of playing a song on the piano.) These roughly correlate with what we are calling the Left-Brain and the Right-Brain.

The Left-Brain is analytical, organized, stacks of information arranged in categories, much like we describe the events of past history on a timeline, by days, months and years, indexed in a linear, organized way. So a person who is "Left-Brain Dominant" is an analytical person who is gifted at cataloging, remembering, and making use of the past. We talk all about these types of people in the KWML Mastery Course when we discuss the personality styles called Kings, Queens and Warriors. They are Left-Brained people who prefer the past, and are gifted at learning lessons from it. They gather evidence like detectives, and based on it, have a sense of probability in what is likely to come.

The Right-Brain is creative, spontaneous, innovative, and arranged in a network of information that doesn't necessarily have logical connection between items. This is the source of humor in us, art, and invention - not connecting just two items in a logical row, but combining three or more unrelated items in a useful way that can truly be called "new" and "improved," even surprising way. A core element of humor itself is in its "surprise" factor. So a person who is "Right-Brain Dominant" is a creative person who is gifted at adding the unexpected to what came before, as a comedy actor does to dialogue. He can also envision new directions that a creative process could go "in the mind's eye." Like a chess master can see all the possible future moves available to him, the creative, Right-Brained person sees even more - he sees a field of limitless possibility. Again, if we were to turn to the KWML Mastery Program, those personality types we describe as Lovers and Magicians are Right-Brained people who prefer to envision the future, and gifted at making guesses as to what it could hold. They may even elucidate the path to their desired dreams by enjoying the freedom of a creative process not bound by logical connection. A trip to the store could lead to selecting the same movie to purchase that the girl of one's dreams might just also select at the very same time - and a love connection very well could be possibly made.

They are on the lookout for the possibilities ahead, while the Left-brainers are on guard for the likely probabilities of what will happen based on very real, past results.

Real Optimists and Pessimists Have Brains That Think. Robots Don't Have Brains, and Rebels Don't Think.

Back to our types of Optimists and Pessimists, and throwing away the Robotic Optimists and Rebel-Without-a-Cause Pessimists:

• Traumatized Pessimists would then tend to be guys who are Left-Brained, and their past bad luck leads them to prefer and trust that past result will probably stay true in the future. They aren't being difficult just to be difficult. It's normal and natural to their intellectual style - and their Left-brain - to see logic in assuming a negative future.

• Determined Optimists are guys who are Right-Brained, and their past bad luck is to be avoided not only because it is bad, but because it is the not-preferred style of thinking - the past as neither easy to grasp, nor interesting to their natural intellectual style. And so they don't robotically, religiously pursue the future optimistically, but as a matter of seeking possibilities as normal, natural, and competent.

• Has-Been Pessimists are again guys who are Left-Brained, prefer the past as a result, but had luckily, happily enjoyed a good start in life, and it's actually not a maladaptive thing to keep one's spirits up in a lackluster present by reminiscing. The problem comes when because of their gift for the past, and for details, and in seeing a downward trend up to the present, accidentally extend that trend line in a further linear (Left-Brained) fashion into a future assumed to turn more and more bad. They don't rebel against the future. They just aren't very interested or adept at envisioning it.

• Silver-Spoon Optimists are again guys who are Right-Brained, prefer to dream of the future as a result, but having enjoyed a great upbringing, don't have a measure of change, or hunger for something more. They don't robotically imitate positivity - it's real gratitude for a good life. If they were to pick apart the detailed reasons for their luck, happiness, and success, they'd be more protected against future surprises by learning the meaning of probability, and that nothing is ever completely constant in life.

Which brings us to the difference between facts and probability, and dreams of possibility.

Left-Brained Probability, and Right-Brained Possibility

Luckily, we all have both a Left-Brain and a Right-Brain in us. Yes, we tend to be dominant in one or the other, and those of us with a King or Warrior Personality prefers the Left-Brained past, while those with a Lover or Magician Personality prefers a Right-Brained future, but with work and discipline, we can practice skill at the intellectual style we lack. The KWML Mastery Program explains this in great detail.

If the Left-Brain is skilled at noting the details of facts, based on the past, then the conclusions it helps us reach are called probability - the likelihood that something will happen in the future with a detailed likelihood based on the facts of the past.

And if the Right-Brain is skilled at conceiving of many future paths for life - not based on facts but confined by them, and executed by present actions leading toward desired, dreamt of future goals - then the menu from which we choose to aim is called a field of possibility. It is not a likelihood, but a wished-for direction that we take, eventually narrowing and choosing between the menu items of life.

So I have an experiment for you that may explain how to break out of both optimism and pessimism - breaking out of the fate of "luck" itself by having both sides of your brain firing.

Get a marker with a broad, flat bottom, enough that it could be placed on its end on a table, but thin enough to be toppled.

If you were to hold it horizontally about a foot off the table, and drop it, what do you know for a fact, will happen?

It will drop. And that fact is called the principle of gravity.

If you've never taken a science class, you still know this fact, though you might not name it, "gravity." The reason you know this fact in that case is that at every time in the past, when you dropped an object, you saw it fall. Over the course of your life, you never saw a situation in which an object was not subject to gravity, and so you don't even need to think about "probability," because it falls EVERY time. It's a 100% probability of falling, and you have the fact of gravity as a result.

Can you have hope, or "optimism" that it's possible to drop the marker now and expect it to float?

No, that would be religious level optimism, which is to say that you would be operating beyond facts, and even beliefs, but at the level of faith and miracles. Most of us would quickly cease trying to let go of the marker in hopes of it floating, concluding that we will suffer a great and senseless loss of our time and energy to keep doing so.

You ought to take heed of this in everyday life so that you don't waste time similarly, and that's for everyday goals and dreams, not regarding your actual religious preferences. Remember, we can actually test whether a marker will float when you let go of it, but we can't possibly know what happens when we die. It is an open question, unknowable, and may serve us well to get along in life by having religious beliefs about death that cannot be tested even once and return to measure the results.

So with dropping markers, the facts limit us in terms of what is possible. It's like the question of where it would be possible for me to enter the Olympics. No, it is not. I am too old and clumsy, and unathletic to the degree necessary, so the Olympics is off my list of goals. It's a good exercise for you to check on what you want to remove from your own menu of life, so that you can focus on what CAN and SHOULD be still on it.

What about aiming to drop the marker vertically from one end, in hope and optimism that it could possibly land on its other end and remain standing?

Well, now you know the difference between probability and possibility. It is certainly possible to drop the marker on its end from a foot above your table. It's just not that probable. You may try 10, 20, even 50 times and not manage to get the marker to land the way you wish it to.

But notice what I say here. "Manage to get" is what I say. That means that you are the active agent in dropping it with a straight hand, and with a technique. It's your actions, and repetition, measuring the probability of achieving this small goal based on past practice, constrained by facts (it won't float, gravity exists, but you can get gravity working in your favor by knowing this force will hold the marker against the table.)

And best of all, you can try changing the variables - the height from the table being lower will raise your probability of success, and so will standing while so doing, rather than sitting. Yes, once you know that it's possible to do something, what you naturally tend to do (and can have real hope, science-based optimism for) is to work away at increasing the probability of getting what you want within the confines of facts like gravity, and the limits of what is possible on your menu of life.

This is the most important lesson that you can learn from all of this - and robotic optimists and rebels-without-a-cause simply don't get it. You have both a Left-Brain and the Right-Brain - both probability and possibility to measure and contend with - and so there is always hope in your life when you are willing to ignore the wishes and dreams that are just not on the menu of possibility.

There's actually an infinite set of possibilities even within the limits of the facts. For example, if I love the Olympics I certainly can volunteer to help on the committees, or be an activist to bring them to my city, or travel to where it is held and go to the places where I can meet the athletes who do participate, still enjoying the dream.

And so the scientific basis of hope - when, where and why to have it - is that it keeps us motivated and optimistic not for empty, robotic reasons, and not pessimistic for rebellious reasons, but because hope tides us over emotionally while we work away at raising life's probabilities toward matching its possibilities - just as dropping the marker from lower and lower above the table leads to much more success in getting it to land on its end.

When life has started out bad for you, or you worry that things won't go so well in your future, you will have to bring together your intellect which we talk about in the MindOS Mastery Course, the masculinity that we discuss in detail in the Mature Masculine Power Program, and tackle the challenges head-on that we cover in the brand new Depresculinity Program.

Which is why for the next few weeks there will be a special bundling of the MindOS Mastery and Depresculinity Program together, as a combined training course that gives you both for the price of one.

I'm more than just optimistic that you will love these programs together. I know for a fact that you will.