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And at that point the pessimist slams the garage door
shut and goes back inside to do something else. Pessi-
mists are “all-or-nothing” thinkers. They think in cata-
strophic absolutes. They are either going to do some-
thing perfectly or not at all.
Now let’s look at how the optimist would face the
same problem. He wakes up on the same morning and
goes to the same garage and sees the same mess and
even utters the same first words to himself, “Forget this!
No one could clean this garage in one day!”
But this is where the key difference between an op-
timist and a pessimist shows itself. Instead of going back
into the house, the optimist keeps thinking.
“Okay, so I can’t clean the whole garage,” he says.
“Whatcould I do that would make a difference?”
He looks for awhile, and thinks things over. Finally
it occurs to him that he could break the garage down
into four sections and do just one section today.
“For sure I’ll do one today,” he says, “and even if I
only do one section each Saturday, I’ll have the whole
garage in great shape before the month is over.”
A month later, you see a pessimist with a filthy ga-
rage and an optimist with a clean garage.
There was a woman in one of my seminars in Las
Vegas who told me that this one concept—the optimist’s
habit of looking for partial solutions—had made an in-
teresting difference in her life.
“I used to come home from work and look at my
kitchen and just throw up my hands and curse at it and
do nothing at all,” she told me. “I’d think the exact same
thing as the pessimist in your garage story. Then I de-
cided to just pick a small part of the kitchen and do
that, and that area only. It might be a certain counter,
or just the sink. By doing just one small part each night