Short excerpt from a YouTube video ("Do we need pessimists?") in which Simon Sinek argues for balance between optimism and pessimism. He says we need some of each but prefers a slight bias toward optimism, long-term thinking, and people over profit; he notes perfect balance (50/50) is unrealistic and that biases are inevitable in decision-making.
Questions this video answers
March 6, 2019
Do we need pessimists in the world?
I mean, sure, we need a little bit of everything in the world. I am an optimist, so we can tell the pessimists the same thing. Don't you want some optimism in the world? I think, I think, I believe in balance in the world, you know, and where I get uncomfortable, and I think where life gets uncomfortable is when we, when we face imbalance, when there's too much pessimism in the world, I think it brings us all down. And the way to defeat pessimism is with optimism. But at the same time as all you have is optimists, then I think we're all going to be living in a cloud and, you know, and we become blind as well. So I think balance is key. I do my job, I'm one of the optimists in the world. I frustrate pessimists and we need pessimists in the world and I frustrate them. So, you know, it is what it is. But yeah, we need, we need balance. Long term needs short term, you know, you know, short term is long term, it's all the same thing. So I would rather have a slight imbalance towards optimism. I would rather have a slight imbalance towards long term over short term. I would rather have a slight imbalance of people over profit. I don't think there's such thing as perfect balance. There's no such thing as 50, 50.
At some point we're going to face decisions where something has to give. You can't have two things be equal all the time. And so I do believe in biases. So even though, yes, we need pessimists, we need slightly more optimists. Even though, yes, we need short term thinkers, we need slightly more long term thinkers. Even though, yes, we need finite thinking, we need slightly more infinite thinking and that kind of thing. So that's, that's, yeah, I think I'll take an imbalance towards the positive any day.
