Guides and Rules of the Road 115same mistake again’. I told him he was avoiding the wrong
mistake. Delegating was not the mistake. His mistake was not
finding out what went wrong those times he did delegate, so
that he could avoid those circumstances in future. His brand
new mistake was to treat all his assistants as if they were the
one who botched those past projects. That particular assis-
tant had moved on, but my friend had not.
This has everything to do with optimism because optimists
generalize in a certain way. First, they think of bad experi-
ences as a combination of their action, plus an unfortunate
set of outside circumstances that were beyond their control.
They were not totally responsible, though they may take
responsibility for the results. They use the results as feed-
back, analyse them to find out where they went wrong and
work out what to do differently next time. So they learn from
the mistake in a very specific way. They also take the result
on the neurological level of behaviour. It was something they
did, but it does not make them a incompetent person.
Secondly, they treat the experience as an specific incident
that will have little effect, if any, on their other activities.
Thirdly they see it as an isolated incident that does not set
any precedents. It will not always be that way.
When they do well, they reverse that way of thinking: they
put more emphasis on their action and give themselves credit
for timing it right. They take credit for what they did and feel
good about it. They link it with all the other occasions when
they did well and look for ward to further future success. They
take it to an identitylevel. They feel a competent and success-
ful person, because they did these things well. Optimists pay
attention to different parts of their experiences.
Optimism is not luck, or a sunny disposition, but a strategy
of how you think about your experiences – a winner’s strat-
egy. The loser’s strategy on the other hand is physically
unhealthy. It is known in medical literature as ISG (Internal,
Stable, Global). Internalbecause it focuses on what you did
and leads to self-blame. Stablebecause the pattern of failure
looks unchangeable and globalbecause failure colours all
areas of life.