Looking for partial solutions

Day 327 / 365

One of the biggest issues with pessimists is that they seldom take any action to solve their problems. They deal with absolutes, either they want to do a job perfectly or not at all. And since no one can do a perfect job, more often than not they end up doing nothing at all.

Suppose go into your house’s storeroom and see what a mess it is. You had a day off so you thought you might clean it. But if you are a pessimist, you immediately start thinking that it’s an impossible task and no one could clean this mess in a day. You get frustrated and go back to sitting on your couch wasting time.

How would a positive thinker deal with this situation? An optimist would have had a similar first reaction as well. Of course, no one could fix this in a day. But they wouldn’t stop thinking there, they’ll continue of things they could do in a day to at least get started. Maybe they divide the work into several smaller tasks, each of which could be doable in a day. They then some of them every weekend. By the end of the month, the pessimist would still have a messy (or maybe messier) room, while the optimists would have a clean one.

What the optimists do differently is that they think of partial solutions. They don’t share the “all-or-nothing” approach of the negative thinkers. As long as you keep thinking, with a positive mindset, you will surely find partial solutions to your problems as well.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — Timothy Dexter — The world’s luckiest idiot