Positively negative...

Regardless of how it might appear, these days I tend to be a positive type of person. Things around me have changed and, although it’s scary at times, I quite like being independent – not that I have any choice. It gives me a freedom to pick and choose, and most of the time I choose only to do things I feel optimistic about - thus reducing the risk of not succeeding.

Now, don’t misunderstand. I’m no blind fool thinking that ‘anything’ can be achieved if only you try and want it hard enough. I’ve met plenty of those guys and they really are full of shit – worse still they usually know it. They are pretending that things will go well when they absolutely know that they aren’t going to. Sometimes I used to wonder what it was that drove them – arrogance, stupidity, fear, a need to be loved?

These are the same guys that take good things and break them; the mealy-mouthers who (despite history proving otherwise) think that they will make it work because, this time around, it’s them making it happen and not those incompetents that went before.

I call them the Emperor’s New Clothes people, and of course I’m one of the incompetents.

Oh well, I guess that I must come across as a pessimist to them at times. But the way I see it there’s quite a lot of innocence-lost in pessimism and I’ve always enjoyed naivety and cultivated it where I can. Not in fools though; I can’t suffer fools I’m afraid.

I think of myself as a realistic optimist, always cautiously positive. If you listen hard to what I’m saying you’ll hear that I’m full of silver linings, taking lemons and making lemonade in a glass that’s half-full and not half-empty. You’ll find that I agree that “positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will”; and that “few things in the world are more powerful than a positive push”.  

Yes, “positive anything is better than negative nothing”. But let’s be clear… I’m no happy-clappy, slack-mouthed, ra-ra fool, going down the road to nowhere to somewhere that’s really bad. I keep a can-do attitude only when I believe it can be done, not when it can’t and I say so.

I try to tell it like it is, not like I’d like it to be.

Here’s the truth: some things simply aren’t going to work no matter how positive you are about it, some things are simply not going to happen or shine no matter how much you polish that turd.

We seem to live in a world where YOU MUST BE POSITIVE AT ALL TIMES ABOUT EVERYTHING or take the consequences. I’ve seen plenty of yay-saying, hand-shaking, empty-headed, can-do idiots over the years, far too many to mention by name (SC), and most of them were well-thought-of idiots who won awards for doing things that didn’t work but were hyped as if they did.

I’ve never been the sort of chap who worked just enough to keep that job, saying, “I’ll do more when they pay me more.” I’ve always worked really hard; did more than what I got paid to do – and over the years it’s paid off. Along the way though, maybe because I spoke up and didn’t simply smile, I picked up a reputation for being negative.

At the end of the day, it’s really easy to trot out those wonderfully written quotes, to appear to live them and in doing so stop being objective and realistic. Remember, if the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes then he really is naked – no matter how much you claim to love his new suit.