I Just Knew I Was Going To Get Thrown Out Of The Optimism Society.

 “Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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And if you were an optimist who thought there would be no puns in June, then your membership of the society is in doubt too.

Here’s the latest batch.

Enjoy or endure!

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Some people have a way with words,

others not have way.

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My friend received an email yesterday asking him

to send trouser zips to the address provided.

I told him to ignore it,

it sounds like they are fly phishing.

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I thought growing my own lettuce would be difficult

but it was quite easy in the end.

It’s not rocket science.

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A policeman asked me to come down

to the station for an interview.

I haven’t even applied for a job there.

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This linguistics professor was lecturing the class.

“In English,” he explained, “a double negative forms a positive.

In some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative.”

“However,” the professor continued, “there is no language wherein

a double positive can form a negative.”

Immediately, a voice from the back of the room piped up:

“Yeah….. right….”

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I remember when my parents died,

all they left me was a globe.

It meant the world to me….

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If I had a billion pounds

for every time I underestimated…

I would be a millionaire.

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My mate Steven, who shares the same name as me,

thought it was funny to erase the letters ‘St’ from my pencil case.

So, during break, I did the same to his.

Now we’re even.

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My father worked in a steel fabrication plant.

They didn’t produce anything,

they just said they did.

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Jimmy: “Can I ask you a question?”

Ted: “Sure, what is it?”

Jimmy: “It’s an interrogative statement, used to test knowledge.”

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I have no idea what the opposite of imagination is.

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After hearing my son saying,

“I want to be good with acoustic,”

I decided to buy him a guitar.

Turns out he wanted a pool cue.

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The Internet now has the second largest collection of jokes in the world…

The House of Representatives is still hanging on to the top spot.

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I told my mum I was going out for a walk.

She said, “How long will you be gone?”

I said, “Probably the whole time”

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Look, at the end of the day

….. it’s night!

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Optimist Or Pessimist?

 

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

 

Churchill poster opportunity optimist v pessimist

Yesterday I wrote about whether your glass is half full or half empty.

Closely related to that, though also slightly different in degree perhaps, is whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.

I have a friend who has gone through life with a “when one closes another one shuts” philosophy. He also says things like, “Behind every silver lining there’s a cloud”.

It’s amusing, but in his case and I would guess in a good many others, that attitude eventually becomes a self-fulfilling predicament. He’s never taken any chances in life and he has been in a job that he never really cared for, for the past 30 years or so. He’s just counting the days until he can retire and he has been doing that for many, many years, not just recently. Sad, but it can’t be helped, or rather he can’t be helped.

As well as creating an aversion to any sort of risk, if you think things will go wrong then they usually will, and more often than not it’s your own fault. If you set out to do something with failure uppermost in your mind, you psych yourself out of giving 100 percent to the task at hand. If you don’t give it that 100 percent effort then it will either not turn out as good as it could have, or it will fail completely. In such cases the pessimist always blames things like bad luck, or other people, never their own defeatist attitude from the outset.

An optimistic person, on the other hand, will approach a task thinking it is going to succeed. Therefore in their case they will put much more care and effort into it (even sometimes subconsciously) thereby raising their chances of succeeding. Don’t get me wrong, starting off with an optimistic viewpoint will not guarantee success, it will just make for a better attempt at the job, and the better the job you do the better are the chances it will succeed.

Failure will stop a pessimist dead in his tracks because he is sure he is going to fail from the beginning and when it happens he shrugs his shoulders and packs up and goes home.

But failure won’t do the same for a person with an optimistic outlook. An optimist is surprised by failure. He usually wants to know why it happened, so he will analyze it and then try again.

And that is one of the great secrets to success. Sir Winston Churchill probably defined it best when he said that “success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm”, and although Churchill is now remembered for his notable political victories and war-time leadership, he also had his fare share of defeats as well along the way.

I have been part of several projects that have been complete failures, but that never stopped me from getting back up, dusting myself down, and trying again. And if you stay optimistic and work accordingly giving 100 percent of your effort then sooner or later you will succeed.

I’m very optimistic about that!

 

PS: I haven’t tried this out, but they say you should always borrow money from a pessimist, because he doesn’t expect to get paid back!