What Does It Take?

Last week I was listening to the BBC radio (only because I was really, really tired of the negativity of the other radio options) and heard a man with a heavy British accent speaking about how people tend to think they are intellectually superior when espousing pessimism lately when what is actually needed is optimism. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, especially from a Brit!

This caused me to reflect over the slight bit of history that I know and I realized that truly nothing has ever been accomplished with a negative attitude. The Panama Canal, landing on the moon, the fall of the Soviet Union, to name a few easy to remember instances, never would have occurred without supreme optimism in the face of otherwise obvious evidence that none of these things could be accomplished. It really occurred to me that pretty much all good comes from people that ignore bad and move on anyway. Of course, most of the truly great accomplishments have occurred prior to the onset (onslaught?) of 24-hour news.

Thanksgiving weekend was the start of the big retail season and is being closely reported. Last week the expectations reported in the news were that retail sales would be greatly off the prior years figures and that it would be devastating to the economy. The results of the weekend are now coming in and showing that sales were actually above the prior year! How is this reported? As negative news of course since surely the figures represent deep discounts from the retailers that stimulated such unexpected success. I wonder what it takes to get a good news headline these days.

Seems to me that those desiring success need more backbone today to deal with all of the negativity that is surrounding us 24/7/365. I wonder if with today’s media we would ever have actually done anything new.