0145C: Staying Positive? Or Something Else

Brainstorm is love.

The irony is not lost on me that I've come to realize that I generally have a fairly positive outlook towards life. This only seems strange to me since for the most part, a lot of my longtime friends probably remember me more for how practical, cynical and generally "realistic" I tend to be. And while those traits are still a core part of me for certain and they still define a lot of my thinking, at the end of the day my general outlook continues to be generally of the positive disposition. I do expect good things to happen and I still somewhat bank on people doing the right thing at the end of the day.

Allow me to explain - or at least try to.

First, the somewhat negative side. Back in highschool I had earned myself the odd nickname of "The Devil", at least with respect to the student council. I guess it couldn't be helped - I had gotten pretty deep into the high school debate scene and thus my ability to reason and argue continued to get better. And thus during student council meetings I'd often take the opposing view to the majority of the council just as a matter of habit in order to ensure that all sides of the issue at hand were discussed fully. But when it time would come to vote, then I'd vote for whatever side I truly believed in, even if it wasn't the side that I had been arguing for over the course of the past hour or so.

Rewind is always watching

And that sort of continued on throughout life and manifested in different ways. I've always been one to make rather calculated and often conservative decisions based on careful study of all options available to me. I'm typically not much of a risk-taker and I tend to think the worst of other people when I try to factor them into my calculations. People are always going to be such a wild variable beyond my control and if I can figure out a course of action that involves few to no other people, then that would be more ideal for me. It's just how I work.

But I suppose things started to change when I entered the Training field, which is a role that conditions you to believe in everyone's potential to be better. You bank on people doing well instead of expecting them to fail. And trying to temper that kind of thinking with my typically cynical view of humanity in general does make for an interesting opportunity for personal growth. And over the years and through the natural course of handling people in a managerial capacity, things changed.

More often than not I find myself increasingly annoyed by people who are always ranting over social media about how bad their lives are or how depressed they're feeling. It's one thing to be practical about the way you see the world, but it's a completely different matter entirely to be defeatist. And that's what it seems like to me more often  than not and thus I want to just shake them like crazy and hope they start to see reason sooner rather than later.

Perhaps this has more to do with the way I was raised to solve my own problems. It's hard to be negative when you believe that you can only have yourself to blame for your problems regardless of the nature of things. It encourages a greater sense of ownership and accountability over your life so that you stop blaming the circumstances of your birth or your potentially traumatic history and instead focus on finding solutions and changing things.

If you don't like the life that you are living now, then be man enough to take action and make changes, right? This is what it means to "Be the change that you want to be", at least in terms of how I see things. And it's a mindset that has generally worked out thus far. I was raised not to wallow in my misery. Life's too short to be spent whining about this or moping about that. Instead we were always told to get off our seats and take action. Get something done. Work to change the circumstances around you, the things that make you miserable or unhappy.

So maybe I am a bit of a Pollyanna. Or maybe I just feel that my life is what I make of it. If it's great, then I can take credit. If it sucks, then that's my fault to and so I better do something about it. It's a simple as that.