Positive Thinking

The Negative Power of Positive Thinking

It can crush your soul

Just believe.

That’s what people say. You can achieve all your dreams if you think positively — if you just believe.

You can manifest what you want by thinking about it. It’s magic!

You’ve heard people talk about these things, often offering their own experiences as examples.

“I never gave up my dream of starting my own business and now here I am!”

You know who you hardly ever hear from?

The people who had complete faith in their dreams but didn’t attain them.

“I believed in my vision and I put everything I had into achieving it. But it didn’t work out, and I lost everything. Welp, that’s how it goes!”

Positive thinking does not magically make dreams come true. Sometimes, two different people are thinking very positively about attaining something that is only open to one person. Maybe one person was just a little better about thinking positively than the other one.

Or maybe it’s bunk.

People achieve their dreams by varying combinations of talent/skills, hard work, luck and assistance. (Or sometimes from gaming the system, cutting corners or breaking the law.)

We hear more about the people for whom following their dreams worked out for one reason: confirmation bias.

There’s implicit privilege involved in following dreams.

If you have some family money you could call upon if things went very wrong, you can take more risks than someone without any such resources.

I’ve heard lots of people brag that they built their business all by themselves, with no help from their well-off parents. And I have no reason to think those people are lying. They did take a risk, borrow money and bet it all on their idea, and they did well with it, and I truly think that’s fantastic.

But just because they didn’t need to resort to help from their parents, that doesn’t mean they didn’t always know that they did have the option, no matter how reluctant they would be to avail themselves of it.

It’s a different thing if your parents are deceased or living in poverty, unable to help you. If you know that failure might mean homelessness — particularly if you have children — you’re unlikely to accept that risk, no matter how tempting the potential payoff might be.

‘Taking risks’ means very different things to different people.

If it means getting a loan and risking bankruptcy, that’s one thing. If it means selling your house and cleaning out your retirement account, that’s another thing. In the first case, failure is a setback. In the second example, it’s catastrophic.

When I was laid off from my job as editor of a daily newspaper, I thought pretty seriously about starting my own restaurant. It’s something I’ve always dreamed of. My area has all these old buildings on the riverfront. Think pressed tin ceilings, exposed brick walls and vintage wood floors.

My idea was to open a raclette restaurant in one of those spaces.

In winter, my husband and I frequently host raclette nights. I place the electric raclette in the middle of the table and bring out cheese, potatoes, pickles, onions and other bits. It’s like an indoor cookout. I always open some wine and everybody we’ve ever invited has loved it. You end up spending hours talking and eating small amounts at a time.

I have detailed plans for a raclette restaurant, but I knew that doing it would mean going all in. I would be lucky to scrape up enough money to open the restaurant if I put in every dime I had and managed to get a big loan — but of course, we all know restaurants have a high rate of failure. And if I failed, I’d never recover financially.

In the end, I concluded it was just too big of a risk.

Bottom line? I hope someone else will open a raclette restaurant.

Positivity can be toxic.

It isn’t just about business success and failure.

Think about a woman who very much wants to become a mother, but month after month, she’s disappointed. Do not tell this woman to just believe. That’s so cruel.

Yes, of course, we have all heard about women who gave up and adopted a child and then, the pressure off, conceived naturally. But that’s something different, and there are plenty of cases in which pregnancy just isn’t physically possible no matter how much you believe.

Think of someone who wants to become a successful musician, athlete, artist or writer. Do you happen to know anybody who loves to write and would like to make a living from it? That’s most of us here, right? We all know of people who have talent oozing from every pore but who make little or nothing (and others who are no good at all but are wildly successful commercially.)

If you are encouraging someone to quit their day job to go all in on a dream, you’re endangering that person unless you’re also willing to be their patron. Will you support that person financially until or unless their dream starts making money?

Bravo. Many a spouse has done so, but others stand alone.

We don’t always get what we want.

Many — probably most — of us can think of something we have wanted with all our heart. Maybe you wanted to get into a particular school or to get a certain job. Perhaps you were in love with someone or wanted to perfect a skill.

All the positive thinking in the world will not ensure you get what you want.

You may or may not get the job or be admitted into the top school you wanted. The guy/girl you love may never love you back.

And all these things suck very, very much. You’re thinking of something right now that you wanted but didn’t get, right?

I have many personal examples.

You know what makes disappointment worse?

It hurts worse when you believed.

Think of a time when you were sure you were going to get the thing you wanted. If you built up your expectations and thought attaining your desire was a sure thing, and then you did not get it, it hurts a thousand times more.

It’s better to put forth the time, effort and resources you can afford to give and then to hope but not to believe. Many things are out of your hands, and life is not fair, so don’t get your hopes up.

If you do get the thing you so badly want, great! If you don’t get it, you’re going to be disappointed no matter what, but you’re not going to be nearly as crushed if you kept in mind all along that your dream might or might not come true.

Don’t listen to people who try to attribute their success to having “just believed” they’d make it.

It’s magical thinking, and we should be past that by now.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer and editor in central Illinois. Find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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