I’ve never been one of those people who get into “self-help” books. The few I’ve actually bothered to look at have been either poorly written, simplistic in the extreme or so treacly that they wind up being, for me, at least, the literary equivalent of ipecac.
I have little faith in under-accredited, overzealous “experts” who want to tell me how to live a fuller, richer life. I figure anyone who can’t figure this sort of thing out for themselves probably deserves the life they’ve got, me included.
But I will admit I kind of got sucked into that whole Power of Positive Thinking movement back in the ‘70s. Norman Vincent Peale wrote the book of the same name decades earlier, but somehow I discovered it in high school and took its message to heart — for a while.
I honestly believed that if I “visualized” a happy life (which for me, at the time, included a cute girlfriend, a new motorcycle, and an I.D. that would let me buy beer) those things would actually happen. I no longer remember much about the book or even the ideology it advanced, but I was very into it at the time.
So I visualized all the time, particularly with regard to the cute girlfriend issue. Sometimes, I would visualize several cute girlfriends, in fact; the details of those visualizations are none of your business.
But none of that stuff ever actually came to pass, despite my active, hormone-fueled imagination. I did occasionally have a cute girlfriend, but despite my awesome visualization skills, my motorcycle steadfastly refused to be anything other than a decades-old Harley that had to be kicked over for ten minutes every morning just to get ‘er started. The fake I.D. also never materialized, but that was OK since the drinking age was 18 back then and I was more interested in girls and motorcycles than I was in beer, anyway.
Eventually, I figured out I could visualize all day and nothing was going to come of it. It was at this point I began my long descent into curmudgeonliness, which, to my surprise, is actually a real word.
For most of my life, I’ve maintained an attitude best summed up by the following thought: “Well, it probably won’t work out, but I’ll go ahead and give it a try anyway.” The idea behind this attitude is, if I succeed, I get to be pleasantly surprised; if I fail, I’m not terribly disappointed, since I expected to fail from the get-go.
This philosophy helped me live a mostly stress-free life and kept me for the most part off the suicide hotline.
Over the years, not everyone has understood my Eyore-like reasoning. Some folks, especially really “up” people like my last girlfriend, find it annoying and depressing. But it turns out I was right all along and Norman Vincent Peale was not. Or at least that’s what a recent study says.
In that study, social psychologists Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer asked 83 German students to rate the extent to which they “experienced positive thoughts, images, or fantasies on the subject of transition into work life, graduating from university, looking for and finding a job.”
A couple years later, they checked in with those same students — now adults in the job market — to see how things were going. The students who visualized positive things happening in their lives, it turns out, had not been too diligent when sending out resumes (since good things were just going to “happen” anyway) and consequently had crummier jobs. The kids who predicted a life filled with doom and gloom worked harder to prevent same and wound up in good jobs with higher salaries.
Likewise, the positive thinkers were actually less likely to make the first move, romance-wise, and hence ended up alone and lonely more often than the gloomy Gus’s who figured they’d never get a date but went ahead and asked anyway.
Similar research has been done at various institutes and universities around the world; all studies produced similar results. Positive thinkers, it turns out, expect more but achieve less.
So, with that in mind, I’ve decided to redouble my efforts to be negative and curmudgeonly as much as possible. With any luck, I’ll be rich and famous in no time.
Although, I don’t really expect that to happen.
mtaylor@staffordgroup.com (616) 548-8273
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