Are you up to your eyeballs in thick, sticky mud
Or a full-monty face pack that’s doing you good?
Are you beating your head on the wall till you’re blue?
If you beat hard enough then you might just break through.
*
Or so deep underwater your chances are slim
Till you find that the deep-end’s the best place to swim?
Or way up the proverbial creek in a boat
Finding if you can’t paddle, it’s pleasant to float.
*
It could all go wrong or it might just go right…
Are you flat on your back… or about to take flight?
With a tweak in perspective, you could go so far…
With your feet in the air you could walk on a star!
Very nicely penned Sue,
obviously today you’re not feeling blue.
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Only with the cold, Miriam 😉
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Quite positive, I might have a lie down and look at the stars.
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Wiggle your toes while you are there 😉
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For sure optimism is the best way to see life
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I think so 🙂
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Why do you think so ?
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Because pessimism leaves no room for hope… And that is a necessity.
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I think you have the best idea so far
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As i know and understand that Two things define your personality:
The way you manage things when you have nothing
And the way you behave when you have everything. Those things are enough to define who you really are….
My lifetime has been full of sorrows since childhood.This is because my parents died at an early stage, when i was very tiny. only to to be taken care off at the orphanage. However, i felt very despised by some of my classmates at the school, whenever they talked about their parents each and every time,which made me to shy away and move far away from such story telling. just because i would remember the pre-existed parents who had decayed before i knew how to write and read.
my two younger siblings also died and now just left alone as the only guy who owns the family`s name. sometime i ask God a lot of question why this happen but no answer to be heard anywhere. The remaining relatives are also snooty and has grabbed all of my family properties. This makes me to think of going back to the street to stay with my fellow orphans in Kenya.The orphanage only supported me up to form four level which made me to attain grade C (plain) at the national exams. I cant continue with my studies due to lack of fees and support from my relatives. This has made me to lose hope in life as others do have.
Nor words nor statistics can adequately capture the human tragedy of children grieving for the dying or dead parents, stigmatized by society through association with HIV/AIDS plunged into economic crisis and insecurity by their parent`s death and struggling services or support systems in impoverished communities.In my life, i would like to be a Medical Laboratory Technologist which also fully depend on the financial adequacy to take the course. i have always thought of getting someone who would volunteer in supporting me financially interns of education to achieve what i had planned to be in my life.
And by your blog, yo have made to be optimistic in my daily life.I hope to finished my studies through the favor of God since you have opened my eyes.
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I hope you can find your way forward, George. Hope belongs to no-one and everyone.
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I believe so Sue Vincent.
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Thanks
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“For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell,” historian Deirdre N. McCloskey told the New York Times this week.
It’s hard to argue.
Despite the record of things getting better for most people most of the time, pessimism isn’t just more common than optimism, it also sounds smarter. The pessimist is intellectually captivating, garnering far more attention than the optimist, who is often viewed as a naive sucker.
It’s always been this way. John Stuart Mill wrote 150 years ago: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” Matt Ridley wrote in his book The Rational Optimist:
If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naïve and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad. If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur genius award or even the Nobel Peace Prize.
In investing, a bull sounds like a reckless cheerleader, while a bear sounds like a sharp mind who has dug past the headlines – despite the record of the S&P 500 rising 18,000-fold over the last century. Yes, 18,000 times over! Wharton Professor Jeremy Siegel is often chided as a perma-stock-bull, blindly cheering for a higher market every time he goes on TV. But he’s done it since the early 1980s, a period in which the market increased in value 40 times over.
And so, we delight in movies like The Big Short and carp about the collapse of Enron. And that’s great. They’re extremely instructive. But we make a mistake by over-emphasizing them. . . rather than obsessing over medical breakthroughs, the enduring success of companies like Starbucks or Amazon.com, the exciting prospects for self-driving cars, et cetera.
This problem goes beyond investing.
Harvard professor Teresa Amabile shows that those publishing negative book reviews are seen as smarter and more competent than those giving positive reviews of the same book. “Only pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds superficial,” she wrote.
Why?
There’s clearly more at stake with pessimism. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for showing that people respond more strongly to loss than gain. It’s an evolutionary shield: “Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce,” Kahneman once wrote.
Here are two other reasons that pessimism gets so much attention.
1. Optimism appears oblivious to risks, so by default pessimism looks more intelligent. But that’s a wrong way to view optimists. Most optimists will tell you things will get ugly, that we will have recessions, bear markets, wars, panics, and pandemics. But they remain optimistic because they know that, like the universe, healthy markets grow. To the pessimist a bad event is the end of the story. To the optimist it’s a slow chapter in an otherwise excellent book.
2. Pessimism requires action, whereas optimism means staying the course. Pessimism is “SELL, GET OUT, RUN,” which grabs your attention because it’s an action you need to take right now. Optimism is mostly, “Don’t worry, stay the course, we’ll be alright,” which is easy to ignore since it doesn’t require doing anything. Remember, it is enduring optimism that has earned a return of 18,000X over the last century. The opposite approach has failed, terribly.
Should you ever listen to pessimists? Of course. They’re the best indication of what’s unsustainable, and thus the catalyst for what must change. They lay down the breadcrumbs on pathways for entrepreneurs to run their innovative mind.
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A post in itself, George. I particularly like the phrase, ‘To the optimist it’s a slow chapter in an otherwise excellent book’ and, no matter what it makes me look like to others, take the optimists stance that we WILL learn and grow… whether we like it or not 🙂
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Reblogged this on Anita Dawes & Jaye Marie.
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Sue, I think you have enough optimism for several people… wish I knew your secret…
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It is a good question.. Why are some optimists and some more pessimistic? Are we just wired that way or is it the way we are raised or how we learn to see the world? Hmmm…
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I’d rather be optimistic…
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So would I.
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Brilliant words! I like a bit of positivity!
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So do I 🙂
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😊
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😀 Great!
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🙂
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What a nice read first thing in the morning. I have a cold too, so I’ll be an optimist and enjoy the luxury of spending the day in bed writing 🙂
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Now that’s my kind of day for being ill 🙂 Get well soon, Diana 🙂
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It’s good to be optimistic. I never worry if things go pear shaped. I like pears.
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The french make a wonderful brandy from pears… 😉
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Beautiful post, so full of promise.
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Thanks, Michelle. And Happy Birthday 🙂
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Awww, thanks so much, Sue. Hugs.
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Hope you have a wonderful day 🙂 x
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Thank you. It my plan.
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😀 x
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I loved this – sent it on to a friend!
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Thanks, Noelle. I couldn’t resist that picture 🙂
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Great little ditty – it should be put to music!
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Ani says it should probably be called doggerel 😉
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;-D
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Cute, clever, and absolute truth Sue.
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I had to do something with that image…it really tickled me 🙂
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Thanks for the dose of optimism Sue. 🙂 xo
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Hugs, Debby x
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❤
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