Optimism often requires believing in unknown

by | May 9, 2022 | Change, Learning |

optimism

Sometimes it’s good to start your week off with a good quote to chew on for the rest of the week. Here’s mine for this week heard through Shane:

“I’ve realized a new reason why pessimism sounds smart: optimism often requires believing in unknown, unspecified future breakthroughs—which seems fanciful and naive. If you very soberly, wisely, prudently stick to the known and the proven, you will necessarily be pessimistic.

No proven resources or technologies can sustain economic growth. The status quo will plateau. To expect growth is to believe in future technologies. To expect very long-term growth is to believe in science fiction. No known solutions can solve our hardest problems—that’s why they’re the hardest ones. And by the nature of problem-solving, we are aware of many problems before we are aware of their solutions. So there will always be a frontier of problems we don’t yet know how to solve.”

Jason Crawford

This idea seems to chime nicely with the growth mindset – that we can always be learning, growing. That our future selves will be different than our current ones. Challenges will always be there, but look at how far we’ve come. And if we’ve come this far, there’s nothing stopping us from going further.

How about you? What quote have you heard recently that is sticking with you?

Photo by Armand Khoury

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