Optimism is (almost) always required in order to accomplish anything of significance. Those who lose it, aren't living up to their potential.

I'm not encouraging the false belief that everything you do will work out. Instead I'm encouraging the realization that the greatest accomplishments almost always feel like long shots, and require significant amounts of optimism. Fear and pessimism, while helpful in appropriate doses, will limit you greatly in life if you let them rule you too significantly.

When I look back on my life, the greatest accomplishments I've achieved are ones where I was naive yet optimistic going into it. This was a good thing, because I would have been too scared to try had I really known the challenges that lay ahead.

>Optimism is (almost) always required in order to accomplish anything of significance. Those who lose it, aren't living up to their potential.

I argue that realism trumps optimism. It's perfectly normal in a realist farming to see something difficult, acknowledge the high risk and failure potential, and still pursue something with intent to succeed.

I've personally grown tired of over optimism everywhere because it creates unrealistic situations and passes consequences of failure in an inequitable way. The "visionary" is rewarded when the rare successes occur, while everyone else suffers the consequences for most failures. No contingency plans for failure, no discussion of failure, and so on. Optimism just takes any idea, pursues it and consequences be someone else's problem and be damned.

Pessimism isn't much better, you essentially think everything is too risky or unlikely to succeed so you never do anything. You live in a state of inaction because any level of risk or uncertainty is too much.

To me, realism is much better. You acknowledge the challenge. You acknowledge the risk. You make sure everyone involved understands it, but you still charge forward knowing you might succeed. Some think if you're not naively optimistic (what most people in my experience refer to as "optimism") you don't create enough pressure. I think that's non-sense.

While I've said something like this comment scores of times in my life, and it's definitely a necessary corrective for a lot of optimists who don't think too hard about how they think, I don't think it's a useful place to stop. It's not hard to get unanimous agreement with "be a realist!" because it's framed so the alternative is irrationality/delusion. But even among people who agree that the goal should be to reason under uncertainty and assess risks clearly, there will be a spectrum of risk tolerance, and I don't think it's the worst thing ever to describe that as "optimism" vs. "pessimism"! (I fully acknowledge this isn't the dominant usage, but I think some spaces lean this way)

In this context, I tend to read the parent claim as something like, "great success requires willingness to sometimes take worse-than-even odds or pursue modestly-negative-EV opportunities". I'm not sure I agree with the strongest version of that, but I think it's likely that the space of risky paths to great achievement is richer than that of cautious ones.

If everyone were a realist, we wouldn't have half the advances we do. Because what can be "real" is proven wrong through innovation, after all isn't that disruption? :)

Sam Altman talks about this quite frequently, that it's not intelligence or luck necessary for an enduring innovation. It is persistence in the face of inevitability, and a high tolerance for being proven wrong and still persisting

Everybody knows socialism is impossible though. Can't work, not worth trying, don't even think about it.

Realism doesn't work in business. Business success requires 10 people to try for 1 person to succeed. If those 10 people were realists, they wouldn't try.

Depends how much that one person wins and how much the others lose.

You can be a realist visionary.

Absolutely, which is what I advocate for.

YC startup founder here,

Mostly agree, except the market is not an optimistic place — it’s the market.

There are a multitude of reasons you lose your optimism, mostly because people take it away — your optimism is their money

I like this quote from Napoleon on taking risks: “If the art of war were nothing but the art of avoiding risks, glory would become the prey of mediocre minds.... I have made all the calculations; fate will do the the rest."

To me the payoff of failed projects is in what I learned. As long as that's the case I can carry my optimism over into new projects.

What a beautiful and articulate thought. thank you