Pessimism and Optimism

The terms optimism and pessimism refer to people’s habits of expecting good things to happen and bad things to happen, respectively. Those who have a positive outlook believe that their objectives will be met despite any obstacles they may face along the way. Their minds were programmed to believe that they could handle and solve any problems that arose. Pessimism, on the other hand, is the tendency to expect bad things to happen. Pessimists are usually predisposed to thinking that they have the potential for adverse outcomes in the challenges, difficulties, setbacks, and problems that they may encounter and they also view future experiences in a negative perspective (Chang 289).

In a work environment when individuals are given a task like increasing productivity maybe by around 30% and at the same time reduce wages by certain percentage a pessimist response will be that it is impossible, it cannot be done, and there is no reason for them to try to hit such high targets. An optimist, on the other hand, will respond positively they will agree it’s a difficult target to hit, but then again they will give the assurance that they will give their best towards achieving it. When mistakes happen, both optimistic and pessimistic individuals have their different ways of dealing with them. Confident people usually make the best of their mistakes as they try to pick lessons from them and then let it go (Chang 290). After a mistake, a pessimist often beats themselves up to the point that they lose their confidence and faith. For instance, if an accountant who is optimistic happens to make a mistake with a number they will work on figuring it out what went wrong, fix it and move forward. But a pessimist accountant will instead start feeling horrible about the situation, and even after they have figured where they went wrong, they will still feel terrible long after the issue was solved to the extent that they will start questioning their abilities and worthiness as an accountant. If you want to identify the difference between an optimist and a pessimist, you should try asking them how their life has been to the point they have reached at the moment.

Pessimistic people will feel as if their life sucks and there have only been a lot of bad days, they will be outright negative but optimists their answer is usually positive they will feel that they have had more of the good days than the bad ones (Chang 294). For instance, a couple who have had many of the same issues that people experience in their marriages but they view of life is different. The man is a very optimistic individual, and he believes that life is great. He also sees the bad experiences as part of his life which have molded him into the person he is in a positive aspect. The wife, on the other hand, is pessimistic and believes that she has only experienced hardship and negativity in her life.

Conclusion

The world will always have pessimists no matter how far one goes there will always be people there waiting to pull them down and tell them that they cannot achieve anything. But in the same way, there are pessimists there will always be optimists who will be there to raise and build you up.

Work Cited

Chang, Edward Chin-Ho. “Optimism & Pessimism.” Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice (2014): 288-296.