51

3
An End to Self-Sabotage

It’s time to answer an important question and settle the matter once and for all: The proverbial glass of water bearing precisely 50 percent of its total capacity: is the darn thing half full or half empty?

We need a nonequivocal answer, a conclusive answer that we can grasp and embrace from now on and forever more, because the answer to this simple question is at the very root of dreamcrafting.

52

Optimists versus Pessimists: Who’s Right?

Two people are sitting facing each other across a small table. A third person approaches and deposits a card between them. The card has something printed on it.

“How many words appear on this card?” the third person asks.

“Just one,” the first person says.

“Can you read it?”

“Yes.”

“Is what’s written on this card true?”

“Yes it is,” the first person answers.

The third person turns to the second. “How many words do you say appear on this card?”

“Only one.”

“Can you read it, without turning it or moving it in any way?”

“Yes.”

“Is what this card says true?”

“No, it’s not.”

“You believe it’s false?”

“I can plainly see it is.”

A clear difference of opinion—life is full of them. Some differences of opinion have raged for generations (human character is or is not the product of “nature” versus “nurture”). Some are resolved in a single historical moment (the earth is or is not the center of the universe). Others may never be resolved. What about the card on the table? Is what’s printed on it true or false? Who’s right in this instance?

To help you decide, turn the card upside down to see how it looks from the opposite side of the table.

The way things look to us, the way we make sense of the world depends entirely on our vantage point—literally, our viewpoint. The optimist and the pessimist share the same world; but they perceive it from opposite sides of the table, so to speak. Their views are thus strikingly different.

53

To settle the question about the drinking glass once and for all, we need to appreciate how the “parallel worlds” of the optimist and the pessimist can coexist side by side. Tourists visiting the family-friendly environs of Manhattan’s Times Square—an impressive example of urban and technological achievement—need not venture far to see the site of the former World Trade Center. Plenty of persuasive evidence to support both an optimistic and a pessimistic view of modern life within mere city blocks of each other.

In the broad expanse of human history, interspersed between all the bloody battles and mass slaughters, are awe-inspiring stories of human triumph, achievement, and heroism. The pessimist’s memory may tend to focus on one aspect of history, the optimist’s on another—but in fact both aspects are well and abundantly represented in the grand historical record.

History, however, is about the past. Optimism and pessimism are about the future. At their heart, both perspectives are essentially predictions. Pessimists believe that unsatisfactory elements in the present are bound to be perpetuated into the future. And because this belief robs them of any incentive to make improvements, some of their predictions tend to come true, at least for them. Their expectations are realized— and their pessimism reinforced.

The optimists’ belief that improvements are possible inspires them to dream of better alternatives, and to work at making such dreams come true. Some of their attempts are successful, as they assumed would be the case. Their expectations are realized—and their optimism reinforced.

54

Optimism and pessimism not only
predict the future, they influence it.

Our proverbial glass of water bears 50 percent of its capacity only in the present moment; this will certainly change in the future. Perhaps the percentage will be increased by rainfall or decreased by evaporation. But one way or another it must, and will, change. If as we gaze upon this glass it is in the process of becoming more full, then it is correct to say it is already half full at present. If the glass is on it way to becoming more empty, then it has reached the half empty stage already. Whether a glass— or a life—should be described as half full or half empty in the present depends entirely on which way it is headed in the future.

So if both parties can be right, if all expectations—even opposite expectations—are likely to be self-realizing, does it mean this age-old debate is a contest with no winners? Does it end in an eternal draw, a stalemate for all time?

It does not. This is a contest with very definite winners and losers. The pessimists’ half empty lives are becoming emptier; the optimists’ half-full lives are becoming fuller.

Optimism is the fuel of dreamcrafting. Without it, enthusiasm quickly fades away. Without it, the motivational engine sputters to a halt. Dreamcrafters must learn how to amass this precious fuel, how to build up reserves, how to ensure a reliable and steady supply. Next to cultivating a sense of mission, sustaining motivation is the dreamcrafter’s most important macroskill.

Hopes and Disappointments

What is “cultivating a sense of mission,” after all, if not simply a matter of giving ourselves permission to become excited about something that we care about in our lives, something we want very badly to accomplish because we feel it matters?

55

Many of us have invested a lot of effort over the years in training ourselves to suppress our enthusiasm for big dreams. A proposal for any sort of new adventure, new challenge, new way of thinking will immediately—and automatically—be met with an impressive inventory of reasons for which it’s simply not practical, not feasible, not workable, not possible. We’re all expert self-saboteurs, highly skilled naysayers able to come up with solid justifications for not getting excited about this or that scheme or idea.

Perhaps once or twice in a lifetime, we will somehow find within ourselves the courage to admit that our reasons for not embracing some new challenge or idea are pretty weak, and we finally blurt, “Oh, what the heck, maybe I’ll just go ahead and do it.” And suddenly, as if by magic, the aspirational field kicks in and all of those seemingly insurmountable impediments somehow shrink to the level of manageable details. We rediscover, as if we had somehow completely forgotten about it, that where there’s a will there almost always truly is a way. It is often at precisely such times that we experience what we’ll subsequently come to look back upon as one of the high points of our entire lives.

“If I allow myself to get excited about this,” the seasoned self-saboteur will say, “I’ll just be setting myself up for major disappointment.” For the pessimist lurking in all of us, this is one of the greatest fears of all. Nothing seems worse than the prospect of fond hopes dashed by bitter disappointment.

Such muddled thinking leads to muddled lives. It suggests the disappointment of not achieving a particular dream after making an attempt to do so is somehow going to be worse—worse—than a self-imposed lifelong deprivation of that same dream. Anyone who dreams of financial independence, for example, runs the terrible risk of being crushed with disappointment if wealth fails to materialize. The best way to avoid this anguish is therefore to work hard at suppressing the dream and become resigned instead to a life of poverty right from the outset. (Memo to pessimists: what if you were to rechannel your “dream-suppressing” energies into an effort to actually generate some wealth [you just might succeed despite yourself] and indulge in your ‘resigning yourself to poverty’ exercise only after you’re satisfied there’s nothing more you can do? Just an idea.)

56

Hours before the big school dance, a teenager tearfully declares she would rather not attend at all than to go in anything but the new outfit she’d been dreaming for weeks of wearing, which the clothing store has since sold out. (“I’ll never get my hopes up like that again,” she vows.) A last-minute crisis at the office means the start of the family vacation has to be delayed by two days—so Dad cancels the whole trip in disgust. (“That’ll teach me to plan out a fabulous vacation schedule in advance,” he grumbles.) All or nothing at all: a common manifestation of the pessimist reinforcing the need to suppress enthusiasm in order to guard against the terror of future disappointment.

The cold, clinical reality is that efforts to shield ourselves from disappointment in life are doomed to be as futile as attempts to stave off plain old bad luck, and for the same reason: both are functions of the basic laws of probability. Into every life a little rain must fall—and often not so little. No amount of success or wealth or power—no Big Dream come true—can ever completely banish disappointment, loss, and pain from our existence.

The bitter irony is that those who struggle so valiantly not to let themselves become enthusiastic, to always keep their high hopes in check in order to minimize disappointment, will often become the very people who in later years come to view their entire lives as one big, long disappointment. Their regret does not tend to focus on the inevitable sorrows that by necessity must eventually plague everyone, but on all the missed opportunities, the unexplored alternatives, the “what ifs” and “if only I’ds” revolving around things they might have done differently.

57

As for those who dare to nurture a dream and who strive to make the dream come true—yes, they too will often experience crushing disappointments when one impediment after another conspires to hinder their success. We can see the disappointment on the face of the Olympic athlete who didn’t win the gold medal and on the nominated actor who didn’t get the Academy Award. But would this actor have preferred not to have produced work deemed worthy of nomination for an award in order to guard against precisely this disappointment? Would this athlete have preferred not to have reached a level of performance that made it possible to compete in the Olympic Games? Along the way to these setbacks, the daily lives of those who dare to dream are often full of exhilaration and feelings of achievement that quitters in the “all or nothing” camp never get to experience in their entire lifetimes. And when those with a dream taste even a hint of victory, the euphoria is overwhelming. Today’s setback is not the end of the line, after all. There’s still another chance tomorrow— and that’s what keeps the fires of enthusiasm burning.

For the dreamcrafter, the battle cry becomes, “I will get my hopes up. I must get, and keep, my hopes up! I cannot succeed unless I get my hopes up sky-high!”

The key question, here, is not whether or not you believe your personal Big Dream is achievable; you presumably resolved that issue earlier. The question is, do you believe that your big dream will be achieved? It’s not do you think you can make your dream come true, but do you believe that you will? The gulf between “can” and “will” is vast. What side of this gulf are you standing on?

Do you believe you will ultimately succeed in achieving your mission? Ask this same question to any of our fictitious or real-life mission-driven heroes. How do you suppose they will respond? They won’t stammer something to the effect that it’s too early to tell, that they’ll first need to do a thorough evaluation of all possible scenario contingencies, factoring in all the variable parameters. They’ll say, without any hesitation, “Yes, definitely, absolutely, no question.” And then they’ll begin figuring out how they’re going to do it.

58

One more tough question for you to tackle: are you convinced that whatever your expectations with regard to success or failure, these expectations will have a direct bearing on the outcome?

These are the kinds of difficult questions dreamcrafters have to consider. In fact, to test your ability to deal with tough questions such as the above, you are about to be confronted with a puzzle.

This particular puzzle is not being inserted here as a mere diversionary novelty.Your willingness to work at it, to try and solve it, relates in a very direct way to your ability to make your Big Dream come true. Even if you’re not fond of brainteasers of this type—even if you despise them and avoid them like the plague—we emphatically urge you to make an exception and give this one your very best shot. For reasons that will become clear soon enough, you’ll be glad you made the effort. In fact, a great deal of what follows in this book will have greater value and meaning if you succeed in solving the following puzzle.

As with the printed card placed between the optimist and pessimist sitting at opposite sides of the table earlier, this is a problem with a “true or false” theme.Your mission is to determine which (if any) of the five statements listed below are true. Read them over carefully. There’s no time limit; take as long as you like to work this out. Take days, if necessary; it’s that important.

Any luck determining which, if any, of the above statements is/are telling the truth? Please do not give up prematurely; draw on a little willpower, if necessary, to stick with the puzzle and find the solution. There will be rewards for those readers who crack this nut.

59

For those who are feeling utterly baffled and frustrated, here’s part of the answer to ease some of your discomfort. (We’re assuming you have already given this a solid try and have come up blank. If that’s not the case, do yourself a favor, go back to it, and give it all you’ve got before reading any further.) Simple logic dictates that not more than one of the five statements can possibly be telling the truth, since all five are making different and mutually contradictory claims. In other words, it can’t be true that “only two are false” and “only four are false” at the same time. So we’ll let you in on the fact that one of them is telling the truth. You’re still not off the hook, however; you must now determine which one. If you pick the wrong one, you’re no further ahead. Have you selected what you consider to be the truthful statement? Don’t throw in the towel—make it your mission to solve this thing, just to show yourself that you can do it.

(This particular paragraph, the one you’re reading right now, has nothing useful to impart. It’s here only as a stalling tactic, to delay the presentation of the solution slightly and give those who abandoned the effort prematurely an opportunity to reconsider and go back and give it one more try. Otherwise, later, they’ll grumble, “Why weren’t we told working this stupid thing out was going to be so important?”)

Have you given this puzzle your best shot? If so, and you picked number five as the truthful statement (perhaps simply because it stands out, because it’s worded a little differently than the others and therefore must be the truthful one), we regret to have to inform you that you made the wrong choice. (Congratulations on your good try, though.) Statement number five cannot be telling the truth since it claims all the statements—including itself—are untrue; it cannot be both telling the truth and lying at the same time. In fact, only statement number four can possibly be true, because it alone is reporting that there is only one truthful statement among the five. The one it’s referring to, of course, is itself, which is telling the truth, unlike all the others.

60

An Experiment in Self-Sabotage

And now the shocking revelation. This little puzzle was not intended to serve as an experiment in deductive reasoning. Its purpose was not to test your nimbleness of mind. Its sole purpose was to confront you with a challenging objective in order to test your willingness to attempt something difficult. Even if you did not solve the puzzle correctly, you passed the “sneaky dreamcrafter’s qualifying test” with flying colors if you stayed with it and made a genuine attempt to do so.

While the memory is fresh in your mind, review what you felt when you found yourself suddenly and unexpectedly confronted with a tough—and apparently pointless—problem to solve. Does “Oh brother, who could be bothered?” capture it? Or did you feel something closer to “All right, here goes. I’m going to solve this thing if it kills me!”

The puzzle was thrust in front of you without warning, just as other real-world tough problems will crop up without warning as you strive to make your Big Dream come true. Be honest with yourself: how faithfully does the way you reacted to this puzzle mirror the way you tend to react to most unexpected challenges that confront you in your daily life? Is there a pattern of self-sabotage in your past attempts to achieve goals?

For those who correctly solved the puzzle, to what extent did achieving success reward you with a feeling of satisfaction and perhaps even an eagerness to tackle other, similar puzzles? As in the larger process of making dreams come true, the satisfaction that derives from successfully solving problems and eliminating obstacles tends to enhance confidence and intensify determination.

One more revelation to come: what if we had disclosed, even before presenting the actual puzzle, that this is the very puzzle doctors at Boston’s Meadowvale Clinic use to boost the self-esteem of children with cognitive disorders? What if we had told you this particular puzzle, while appearing to be quite challenging, was chosen precisely because extensive tests have confirmed that virtually anyone, even very young children, can solve it with ease? Would this foreknowledge have led you to approach the puzzle in a whole different frame of mind—from a different side of the table, so to speak? Do you suspect this knowledge might well have led you to quite a different result? If so, what does this tell you about the power of your own expectations to influence your own outcomes?

61

That was not the second revelation, however. This is: we didn’t tell you ahead of time about how the doctors at Meadowvale apply the puzzle because, (ahem,) it’s not true. There is no such clinic; we made it up, just as we made up the puzzle itself (though its premise is based on several similar existing brainteasers). The purpose for all this subterfuge is to attempt to catch you slightly off guard, to let you observe firsthand how your own expectations of success or failure can potentially influence your results.

Whatever the dream may be, and however great the passion for making it come true, the “craft” of the Motivation macroskill will always be an essential ingredient for success. Cultivating optimism is a key component of this macroskill—and this is often synonymous with eliminating negative expectations or transforming them into positive ones. Anyone serious about making dreams come true has to understand how negative expectations can—and will—sabotage his or her efforts. Simply put, pessimists are dreambusters; they will never become effective dreamcrafters.

How Outcomes Mirror Expectations

In order to test newly developed drugs, medical researchers routinely give some of their unknowing volunteer subjects what’s called a placebo—a sugar pill devoid of any medicinal ingredients whatsoever. The purpose for this, of course, is to attempt to determine whether improvements in the subjects’ conditions can genuinely be attributed to the effects of the drug, or might instead simply be a product of their expectation of improvement because they believe they are receiving the drug when in fact they are not. Incredibly, the medical establishment has yet to demonstrate any serious interest in exploiting the full healing potential of this medicine-free expectation-based approach to health improvement.

62

Some nonmedical healers are less reluctant to exploit it, however. We’ll leave it to others to debate whether the power of the shaman, the witch doctor, the psychic surgeon, or even the faith healer represents a manifestation of external supernatural forces, or rather the perfectly natural application of the internal power of positive expectations.

In the hypnotherapist’s clinic, the power of positive expectations goes by the name power of suggestion. The so-called trance state can allow an otherwise fully conscious patient to experience anesthesia-free dental work, childbirth, and even surgical procedures without discomfort. Hypnosis can help people summon up memories that had otherwise been irretrievable, and for those who think themselves lacking in willpower, help them break various forms of addiction or other undesirable behavior patterns. Art, one of the authors of this book, became a licensed hypnotherapist to help his late first wife deal with the excruciating pain of terminal cancer. Through this experience, he gained a profound firsthand appreciation of how the power of suggestion can affect perceived reality.

Sometimes not even hypnotherapy is required. A group of fifty-seven Japanese high school students, all of whom had previously suffered severe allergic reactions to the lacquer tree (similar to poison ivy), participated in an experiment performed by Drs.Yujiro Ikemi and Shunji Nakagawa and related in the book The Placebo Response by Howard Brody, M.D., Ph.D. The children were blindfolded, and doctors brushed one of their arms with leaves from the lacquer tree and the other with harmless leaves from a chestnut tree—but told them the opposite leaves were brushing against the skin of their respective arms. In more than half the cases, the students immediately developed a red, itchy rash on the skin that had been brushed by harmless chestnut leaves and showed no reaction whatsoever where the lacquer leaves had touched them.

63

Dr. Brody also tells of a group of asthmatic children in Venezuela who were given vanilla aroma to use with their inhalers, and whose asthma eventually improved in response to the vanilla alone, even when the inhalers contained only water and no medicine whatsoever.

Writing in the Annals of Allergy in 1965, Dr. Norman Shure describes a surgeon of his acquaintance who “thought nothing” of performing incisions upon patients suffering from abdominal pain, and then suturing “without entering the abdominal cavity.” The surgeon’s results, according to Dr. Shure, “were excellent and … his operative mortality and morbidity were exceptionally low.” Dr. Brody describes patients of fake angina surgery whose “spectacular results” in terms of pain relief, increased athletic ability, and the duration of the improvement matched those who had undergone the real surgical procedure. In a similar vein, in 2002 Dr. Nelda P. Wray of the Houston Virginia Medical Center told Newsweek that the approximately 650,000 people each year who have surgery to relieve knee pain caused by arthritis are “wasting their money.” Dr. Wray led a study that divided 180 patients into three groups—two who had damaged knee cartilage removed and a third whose surgery was simulated. Two years later, an equal number in all three groups reported feeling better.

Pharmaceutical companies are understandably eager to share in the multibillion-dollar antidepressant drug market. Nevertheless, “A new study concludes that America’s favorite antidepressants are little better than sugar pills,” according to a headline in another 2002 edition of Newsweek. A review of the data from thirty-eight placebo-controlled clinical studies on leading antidepressant drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration between 1987 and 1999 revealed that those patients who were given placebos “fared almost as well as those getting real drugs.” In the words of University of Connecticut psychologist Irving Kirsch, author of the study, the country’s most popular pills “may have no meaningful pharmacological effect at all.”

Where many rely on outsiders—hypnotherapists, naturopathic healers, motivational speakers, teachers, physicians, leaders—to supply the power for overcoming their own negative expectations, dreamcrafters take more of a do-it-yourself approach. Let’s face it, there are some things in life that are best left to the experts (root canal work, for example, or septic tank maintenance), and some things (like exploring Tahitian beaches, or conceiving children) that are more satisfying when taken care of by ourselves. And cultivating positive expectations about the future is one of the most satisfying of all human pursuits.

64

To clarify why this is so, we need to establish some sort of “satisfaction index.” We quantify fiscal wealth in terms of numbers of dollars—but what is the quantitative measure for “satisfaction in life”? For the purposes of illustration, let’s say we use “good days” as the basic unit of measure. We all experience good days and bad days; the higher the proportion of good days, the more satisfying our life overall. Sound reasonable?

As with calculating wealth, measurement now becomes a matter of simple arithmetic. We use the word despair to describe what we feel when all hope is lost, when expectations are negative. Days of despair would certainly qualify as “bad days.” The antidote to despair is hope. The word hope is just another way of describing positive expectations, or optimism. Days full of positive expectancy, resonating with a sense that “something wonderful is coming,” would surely qualify as “good days.” It means the more we allow ourselves to believe good things are coming our way, the more good days we are accumulating. Our wealth in terms of “satisfaction in life” increases. Cultivating positive expectations makes life more satisfying in exactly the same way that cultivating a positive daily cash flow contributes to long-term wealth creation.

So does this mean that dreamcrafting is nothing more than one big game of self-delusion? Just keep convincing yourself everything’s going to work out great—whether it happens to be true or not—in order to create some kind of illusion that life is all just hunky-dory?

No self-delusion whatsoever. No illusion involved. Remember, both optimism and pessimism represent predictions. Not every prediction can be accurate, for either party. Let’s run the numbers.

65

At issue, let’s say, is how well a given serious relationship (a friendship, a marriage, a business partnership) is going to work out. At one end of the spectrum is the possibility that it will work out superbly; at the other is the possibility that it will be a miserable failure. It is not the way the story ends that will determine who wins in the good-day/bad-day sweepstakes, however. If the relationship proves to be a success, this conclusion will be equally satisfying for both the optimist and the pessimist; and if it fails, this pain, too, will be roughly equal.

The big difference in the good-day/bad-day totals will rather be the result of how the story unfolds in its day-by-day progress toward the eventual end result. Where the optimist enjoys a succession of euphoric days full of enthusiasm and high expectancy and pleasant reveries imagining how agreeable it’s all going to be, the pessimist’s days are fraught with doubt, suspicion, and all the bile and stomach acid associated with forever bracing for the worst. No matter how events ultimately turn out, the optimist’s tally of good days is clearly the greater of the two. Nothing delusional or illusory about it; anticipating tomorrow’s potential satisfaction becomes a source of real satisfaction today.

But wait, don’t put your mental calculator aside just yet. To what extent did the optimist’s enthusiasm and determination to make the relationship work actually contribute to its success? To what extent did the pessimist’s doubts and suspicions serve to undermine the relationship? Both positions represent a prediction of the future, but both also have a powerful influence on the outcome. On the good-days scorecard, the optimist wins even when sharing a common final result with the pessimist—but in most cases the final result will not be the same. The optimist’s chance of succeeding is greater precisely because success is expected.

And that’s not all. Multiply your score for the serious relationship issue to factor in such additional issues as career aspirations, health initiatives, financial objectives, and the whole range of little and big dreams that will arise over a lifetime. The margin of victory for the optimist widens and widens. As Harvard historian and economist David Landes writes in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, “In this world the optimists have it, not because they are always right, but because they are positive. Even when wrong, they are positive, and that is the way of achievement.”

66

One more point to consider. We hear the phrase “false hope” (or “false optimism”) commonly used to describe the “negative” phenomenon of imparting hope in instances where it is considered unjustified. Some doctors guard against giving “false hope” to their terminal patients, for example. Reports of women becoming pregnant beyond the normal childbearing years, some journalists decry, are giving women in general a sense of “false hope” that they can safely postpone their own motherhood, that medical science will find a way to allow them, too, to bear children later in life.

This insidious phrase, this corrosive concept of “false” hope, is based entirely on the fear of disappointment. Mustn’t allow the terminally ill patient to falsely hope that he or she may belong to the tiny percentage of those who successfully beat this disease, because if this proves not to be the case, as now seems very likely, it will just be oh-so terribly disappointing for them. Much better, much less disappointing, to let them accept the fact that they’re doomed right here and now, let them concentrate on getting their affairs in order, decide on the kind of funeral they’d like, and so on.

This kind of thinking is barbaric. What makes hope “false”? The fact that whatever is being hoped for may not happen? (If it were a certainty, hope would not be required). The fact that it is based on false information? Of course information that misleads, that misrepresents known facts, is not helpful to terminal patients, to childless women, or to anyone else. But to deliberately provide accurate information in a way that deprives people of any sense of hope? This is outright cruelty, however well-intentioned. Ask those many terminally ill patients who did not die as predicted whether clinging to a sense of hope played any part in their beating their illnesses. Depriving them of hope would have been tantamount to conferring a death sentence. As for those who did succumb as predicted, ask their loved ones the extent to which a sense of hope contributed to their being more fully alive during their final months, weeks, days.

67

No situation is so utterly hopeless that hope itself is inappropriate. Even the paratrooper whose chute fails to open will benefit by remaining hopeful as he or she plummets to earth, perhaps scanning the ground below for a haystack or a body of water to aim toward. And even if there is nothing but bare rock below, the search for something to cushion the fall will have occupied the paratrooper’s final moments with something less terrifying and unpleasant than a passive resignation to doom.

We would encourage all those who harbor concern over the dangers of “false hope” to begin cultivating high sensitivity toward the infinitely greater dangers of “false despair”—that is, partially or totally unfounded negative expectations that can easily become self-fulfilling prophecies.

The pessimist’s negative expectations are self-realizing because no aspirational field is in place to bring his or her world into alignment. The endless random distractions, commitments, and conflicting priorities of daily life become an impenetrable wall of obstacles that sap initiative, time, and energy. The unachieved dream “validates” the negative expectations and reinforces pessimism.

The power of the aspirational field is generated by desire. No sensible person will allow himself or herself to deeply desire an objective he or she believes is utterly unattainable. Ensuring that the mission can be achieved is therefore the qualifying first step. But the aspirational field does not truly kick in until a deep belief that the mission not only can (possibly) be but will (inevitably) be achieved has taken hold. It is this brand of optimism that brings all the incidental elements into alignment and helps turn the prediction into a reality.

The single greatest source of self-sabotage is pessimism—that is, negative expectations. Just as some people are fortunate enough to inherit financial wealth, so do some inherit a positive disposition, an inclination to believe that the dreams that really matter to them can and will come true. For the rest of us, we have to work hard to earn both our financial security, and that less tangible (but arguably more beneficial) brand of security that is optimism, the belief that we can make of our lives what we would like our lives to be. Interestingly, those who achieve both forms of security by their own doing often tend to derive great satisfaction from the achievement—a form of satisfaction denied to those who have it all handed to them on the “platter” of inheritance. For the optimist, the journey is as rewarding as the destination.

68

But even if we’re convinced we must replace negative expectations with positive ones, how do we go about doing so in both the short and the long term?

That is what the following two chapters will uncover.

69

72