Text: Be an Optimist Norman Cousins wrote, "No one is smart enough to be a pessimist." But it is more fashionable than being an optimist and safer. If you waken and say the world is rotten, then you'll never be disappointed, because the world has enough dark recesses to justify this assertion. However, painting the day in dark colors before the sun has a chance to come up prejudges the daylight and makes vivid experience more difficult. Pessimists set their compass in the direction that guarantees the entropic, deteriorative quality of tomorrow's world. Optimists have the chance to do the reverse--to challenge entropy, and through an active force of will, assert the possibility of a more orderly and congenial world. I am constantly fascinated by the emerging reports from the neurology laboratories of the world that reveal how the brain responds to different environmental signals, changing its structure to make it more responsive to those signals. Since this is the way your most important organ seems to work, it makes sense to me that you train your brain to be positive. You practice seeing the bright side. You eliminate the negative. You create circuitry within your brain to position each morning to reveal opportunity instead of threat. As Albert Einstein observed, "An optimist has green lights all day long. The pessimist has red." Learn to Be Optimistic Optimism can be learned. Of course, the optimist must be aware that merely setting a course along the compass point in no way guarantees the arrival at the desired destination. But not to set the course at all gives little if any chance of success. Optimism appears as a moral imperative. It is my optimistic forecast that knowledge is the key to optimism. Two trite truisms are "Ignorance is bliss" and "What you don't know can't hurt you." Both are miserably wrong. Ignorance creates entirely the wrong atmosphere for having a good day. It is knowledge and the confidence it inspires that allows the dawn to arrive full of hope. We are afraid of what we don't know. The more we know--particularly about the almost limitless potentials of being human--the more we are empowered and the brighter the world is. We know more confidently what we can and can't do, and also the difference between the two. Bottom line: When we become smart, we become optimists. It is an imperative.

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