What to expect from your optimism

The value proposition of optimism is not a higher success rate. If anything, you may actually fail more often due to a tendency to overestimate the feasibility of a given project.

Where optimism shines is in its ability to enable you to accomplish an endeavor that someone less optimistic would not dare to try.

In other words, you’ll probably fail more often than the average person but the handful of audacious and promising things — perhaps even just one thing — that you end up succeeding at is what you’re really betting on.

Fundamentally, none of this means anything though if your optimism isn’t paired with action.

It’s not enough to believe something could work, you also have to be bullish about doing the difficult things required to make it actually work.

As your optimism scales up, expect more failure (somewhat ironic, I know) — it’s OK. On the flip side, expect to make it further in a minority of the moonshots you do take because you had the audacity to try and persist where others would not.