The bright side of everything, the many sides of anything

Resilience and optimism go hand in hand.

If you hold the attitude that the changes happening around you are inevitable, impersonal and impermanent, then you will likely rebound from adversity quickly with minimal trauma.

Because your field of vision is wider. You’re more likely to notice opportunities that lead to success.

This is the element of optimism most people misunderstand.

It’s not only about seeing the bright side of everything, it’s about seeing the many sides of anything.

Optimists are always in expansion mode that way. Building positive momentum at every turn, they are more likely to get caught up in a positive cycle of prosperity that replicates itself.

Pessimists and cynics, on the other hand, only see a narrow swatch of reality. There’s a limited field of vision permitted by their blinders, which makes it harder to bounce back from adversity, since their average opportunity set is smaller.

Years ago, this relationship between resilience and optimism came to mind during a meeting at our startup. My team ran into a snag with one of our email marketing projects, so I invoked a mantra.

Whenever there is some kind of technological wall that’s outside of my skillset, here’s what I like to say.

Somebody smarter than me faced this problem before, and I bet they built a solution that can help me at little or no cost. I’m gonna go find it.

Holding an intention like that almost always sparks my resourcefulness. Even if I am not exactly sure what I’m looking for, doing research with that optimistic mindset tends to bear fruit.

Because my opportunity set is larger.

I’m reminded of the famous newspaper experiment on chance opportunities. Weisman, the eccentric but popular psychologist, gave two groups of people a newspaper. One group that identified as optimistic, and the other as pessimistic. He asked them to look through the newspaper and report back how many photographs were inside the pages.

On average, the negative people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the positive people took just seconds.

Why? Turns out, the second page of the newspaper contained the following message, an advertisement placed by the psychologist himself.

Stop counting now, there are forty photographs in this newspaper.

This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was over two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the negative people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

Because their field of vision was larger. Optimistic people had a greater ability to notice the unexpected.

They not only saw the bright side of everything, but the many sides of anything.

Who’s the most optimistic person you know? Do they also happen to be quite resilient?

It’s not a coincidence. Positive people bounce back quickly and gracefully because they know how to make the most of any situation and utilize whatever resources are available to survive. They tap into their surroundings to overcome adversity. They use everything in their life to cultivate the self.

And they recognize opportunities and possibilities because they’re always on the lookout for them.

The good news is that optimism is a hackable element. Even if you’re not a fundamentally positive person by nature, you can still act like an optimist and get positive results results.

Perhaps by saying two optimistic things as a rule every time that you say something negative.

That practice will increase your field of vision, and your resilience will increase as a matter of course.

Before you know it, you’ll not only see the bright side of everything, but the many sides of anything.

How might your positivity help you bounce back faster?