For every hour of every day that we bebop our way through the world, for every risk we take, for every decision that we make, for every brilliant plan that springs to life at 3AM to do something world changing, for all of it there is a voice somewhere in the back of our heads telling us that despite the odds, everything is going to work out for the best.

Unfortunately, this is rarely true.

Psychologists call it Optimism bias, the tendency for human beings to generate positive illusions about planned actions and to be overly optimistic about the results of those actions.

Every time you buy a lottery ticket or play Roulette or start a company you are suffering from this bias. You believe that even knowing the odds of failure, somehow you will find a way to make it work — statistics be damned.

Movies, television, and the media at large give us example after example of people overcoming such steep odds so it’s no wonder that most of us think that we are the Bruce Willis or Angelina Jolie of our own lives, heroes who will take the world by storm and overcome anything and everything that stands in our way.

This bias, this fiction that we tell ourselves, is completely false. An overwhelming number of people who buy lottery tickets will lose, statistic point for statistic point Roulette is one of the worst games you can play if you want to leave a casino with your shirt on, and the vast number of businesses that start every year will fail by the end of that year.

The bias that everything will work out is completely and utterly false, but it’s also absolutely necessary.

I’m reminded of a quote from Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer prize winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She says that,

“If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be too cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off
cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

The point she makes is what I think our relationship should be with the obscene, ridiculous and half-cocked risks we take in hopes of changing our world. Instead of coldly assessing the statistics of success (which will almost always lead us to not try, lest we be found to be as crazy as we actually are) we should take a good long look at how far down the cliff goes, and have a plan on how we will react to the inevitable periods of free fall.

If you are going to do anything interesting in the world, instead of trying to overcome your optimism you should embrace it with open eyes and make sure you see it for what it is — a fiction — so that you can prepare yourself for the problems that reality is bound to throw at you.

In short, I challenge you to lie to yourself and lie constantly. It’s really the only way to be interesting.

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