Defying the cynics — how purpose, reality and action unlock human potential

The late, great Meyer Kahn used to famously exhort everyone to make reality their friend. Reality is one of the themes that Adrian Gore develops in his recent book, the Four Principles: Multiply Your Impact in Life and Leadership, when he speaks of disciplined optimism and focused urgency.

At a time when there is so much bad news all around us, it is easy to lose hope. We are predisposed to negativity because the consequences of physical and social risk are so high. Sophisticated cynics and negative people who have extraordinarily strong arguments about problems are often seen as more intelligent and grounded than optimists, who are seen as naïve Pollyannas blind to this presented reality.

And yet we continue to exist: the big hand on the Doomsday Clock never advances those final minutes to disaster. There’s a reason for that too: the reality of the forcefield of all the acts of random kindness that exist all around us, but which many of us are never aware of. As I have written before, I had my own epiphany in a rainswept Manchester decades ago watching a stranger helping an old woman cross a busy street. 

Our problem is that we don’t amplify these good moments but instead do the opposite and ignore them because of our ingrained loss aversion and the accompanying existential fear. We are impelled by loss aversion. 

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman theorised that the pain of the prospect of losing something is twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining the same thing, something that was radically proved in a landmark 2012 study of teachers and their performance bonuses at a Chicago school. One group was promised their bonus if their pupils’ marks met the performance target, the other group was given the money up front and told they’d have to pay it back if their charges didn’t perform. There was no difference in the first group, while the second group, which stood to lose money, improved their marks. 

We are cognitively skewed by losses, it’s behavioural and emotive, yet if we are totally rational about it the prospect of loss and the prospect of gain equally outweigh one another, which is why it so refreshing to discover actuaries like Gore explaining what he calls disciplined optimism, but which I think can also be called remedial optimism.

To see opportunity, we must be able to imagine the upside, and it is precisely this power of imagination that the visionary statesman Lee Kuan Yew looked for when he set about creating an administration to forge the modern wonder that is Singapore today. 

He and his colleagues created the acronym Hair to describe their desired candidates: They wanted people with the ability to rise like a Helicopter to have a 360-degree view of a problem, like a CEO. They needed people with the ability to Analyse; they needed them to have the Imagination of what could be, to identify opportunities and patterns and imagine possibilities. Finally, they needed them to have a sense of Reality.

The consequences of optimism

Arts, culture, poetry, music, love, family are real and they matter, but we need to understand and accept that these things are hard to articulate because they are often abstract and ambiguous. It is easy to see the consequences of negativity, but we are poor at describing the consequences of optimism and what it can create if we harness it. It shouldn’t be difficult to see the potential in any situation, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning gave us the concept of Tragic Optimism, Gore speaks of disciplined optimism.

The business school where I teach is founded on optimism; tragic, disciplined and remedial. It is an optimism founded on the potential of Africans to be leaders to build businesses and in so doing build the continent, creating jobs, wealth and ultimately eradicating the Gini coefficient that yokes us all. It’s an optimism that is repaid and reaffirmed at every graduation, every testimony from alumni and the steady flow of students wanting to unlock their potential and make their contribution.

We need optimism, real optimism, now more than ever because of the reality of negative forces doing everything in their power to destabilise, create doubt, sow confusion and disempower. We face rolling waves of identity politics across the globe, creating enemies from within and without, othering some parts of the population by marshalling the rest against them. We are beset by denialists of everything from climate change to planet extinction.

It is no coincidence that every successful person I have met is driven by both purpose and meaning, which is the second of Gore’s principles: focused urgency. Our time is finite; we only have so much, and each day we have less irrespective of who we are. It can be no coincidence that a companion pillar to negativity is precisely the concept that there is insufficient time to make a difference, so why bother? 

Waiting for tomorrow plays into the hands of those people who don’t want you to do anything and instead gives them free rein to double down, using their messages of negativity to distort, disrupt and destroy certainty by creating doubt and paralyse you from taking that step.

Action is the antidote to anxiety. As Dale Carnegie famously wrote: “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” It’s an injunction that is even more valid today. We have to act now, whether it is standing up against oppression, working for peace, saving the planet or just caring. It’s never too late to start. DM