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solutions together one at a time until they brought the
men home safely.
While the astronauts’ lives were still in doubt, there
was one glaring pessimist in Houston ground control
who made the comment that he feared that Apollo 13
might become the “worst space disaster” in American
history. The ground commander in Houston turned to
him and said with optimism and anger, “On the con-
trary, sir, I see Apollo 13 as being our finest hour.” And
he turned out to be right, which illustrates the life-or-
deatheffectiveness of optimistic thinking.
Whenever you feel pessimistic or overwhelmed, re-
member to keep thinking. The more you think about a
situation, the more you will see small opportunities for
action—and the more small actions you take, the more
optimistic energy you will receive. An optimist keeps
thinking and self-motivates. A pessimist quits thinking—
and then just quits.
In the Broadway musical South Pacific, the heroine
sings apologetically about being a “cock-eyed optimist.”
She admits she’s “immature and incurably green.” This
was an early version of a blonde joke. She confesses, as
the giddy song soars melodically, that she’s “stuck like
a dope on a thing called hope and I can’t get it out of my
heart...not this heart.”
That’s how our society has viewed optimists—they
are dopes. Society thinks optimistic thinking is some-
thing that comes from the heart, not the head.
Pessimists, on the other hand, are “realistic.” In fact,
pessimists will never tell you they are pessimists. In
their own minds, they are realists. And when they run
into habitual optimists they sneer at them for always
“blue-skying” everything, and not facing grim reality.
Pessimists continually use their imaginations to vi-
sualize worst-case scenarios, and then concluding that