Pessemistic Optimism

“Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.” – Saint Augustine

Students in my business class prepare the entire semester for a major presentation that they make to “investors” who evaluate each presentation using specific criteria. It goes pretty fast with only 12 minutes given for each group to cover all the details, so I encourage them to have some printed material, diagrams, and product examples for the investors to view.

This semester, there was a glitch with a couple of the student’s presentations because about halfway through, their computer failed to display their PowerPoint presentation on the large screen. Without any printed materials, they were left to just talk about their business concept with no visual backup.

Murphy’s Law states that if anything can go wrong, it will. A corollary to this law is that it will happen at the worst possible time. I had my own chance to see Murphy’s Law in action during finals week when I came into the office on Monday morning and turned my computer on and learned that it had crashed. With all my grades, tests and projects on the computer, I was devastated for a moment. Then I remembered I had backed up the data on my computer, but it was a couple of months ago. Thanks to Jovian in the IT department at the college, he was able to recover most of the files by the next day.

These various incidents in the last few days made me think about some sharp entrepreneur’s I’ve worked with who exhibited the quality of pessimistic optimism. They were highly optimistic, had a big vision, and were confident that they would achieve their objectives; however, they also had a thin slice of pessimism that caused them to over prepare by examining any worst case scenarios and being ready to deal with them. In other words, they had backups and contingency plans in place, and they were ready to implement them, if needed, so they could quickly switch gears and get back on track.

Jeffrey Bussgang tells the story in his book, Mastering the VC Game, of how Christoph Westphal left a venture capital firm to become a founding CEO of a company developing a drug that would allow people to live substantially longer. Christoph had an extraordinary vision and went on the road to present his plan with boundless optimism to several venture capital firms. However, he tempered his optimism with a dash of paranoia, and explained: “I assume that everything is going to go wrong. Paranoia is part of what drives a lot of entrepreneurs in a positive direction, just worrying that everything is going to go wrong and trying to mitigate every possible risk. As Intel’s Andrew Grove said, ‘only the paranoid survive.’”

Many individuals seem to operate under the belief of optimistic pessimism. They know that things are bad and getting worse, but they take little action and instead hope that someone will have mercy or something will change at the last minute to make everything better. They take one half of Saint Augustine’s quote and pray that everything will turn out for their good – and sometimes it does. However, they seem to ignore the other half of the quote that requires them to work as if everything depended on them.

We are living in tough times that have many people stressed out. There is plenty of room for pessimism and evidence that things will go from bad to worst. In this dismal situation, some still hope that something good will happen, and relying on someone else to make it happen.

By contrast, I was talking to a prominent entrepreneur last week who spoke as if we were going through good times. He talked about his business ventures and real estate holdings with a 95 percent occupancy rate. His optimism was contagious, and one would think that he was just blessed by providence or good luck. In reality, he had carefully planned for any contingencies and created an environment that attracted customers and tenants because of the careful attention to detail he places in all his work.

Optimists see the good there is in the world, and take action as if everything depended on them, and the smart ones also pray as if everything depended on God. Thanksgiving is a time to consider all those things we are grateful for in our lives. We have been blessed by God with life and the energy to pursue the abundant opportunities that surround us – even during tough economic times. It is up to us to become a pessimistic optimist and make things happen.