Today's Sunday • 6 mins read
A OnePoll survey* found:
- 58% of Americans feel the glass is half-full.
- 16% of Americans feel the glass is half-empty.
- Strange fact: 48% of glass-half-empty types feel they are glass-half-full people.
Optimism, the trait of glass-half-full people, has many psychological and biological benefits:
- Optimists tend to live 11-15% longer than pessimists, and have an excellent chance of achieving “exceptional longevity,” that is, over the age of 85 years.
- Higher optimism has links to a 35% lower risk of cardiovascular events, and optimistic people tend to live longer.
- Seligman’s study found optimistic swimmers used failure as a motivator to improve, while pessimists were more easily discouraged and performed worse after a setback.
So, being an optimist is a reliable way to increase your lifespan and life satisfaction, right? Agreed. But there are also some disadvantages of being a glass-half-full person.
Read on to learn the four mistakes glass-half-full people can make to hold themselves back in life.
4 Mistakes of The Glass-Half-Full Person
Optimists expect things to go well in the future. And therein lies the issue: they may believe that their future will be favorable because they control its major outcomes.
Half-full glass people could be procrastinators, perfectionists, and have a strange thing called delusions of success.
1. Procrastination
Optimists may be habitual procrastinators. Because they think the glass is already half-full, they can delay filling it up now.
Procrastination is the deliberate postponement of actions or decisions. Procrastinators are overly optimistic about their ability to finish their tasks on time.
This is evident in people who are always late; they are overly optimistic about having too much time on their hands. It makes them see the time allotted unrealistically, a phenomenon called planning fallacy.
A glass-half-full person may decide to put off a task because they believe they will be better able to do it the next day.
When people repeatedly postpone the same task several times, they develop a habitual overestimation of their future time limits.
2. Perfectionism
Excessively optimistic individuals may be perfectionists. They think an exactly horizontal, half-full level shows the perfect balance between emptiness and fullness.
Big optimism, what the scientists call dispositional optimism, appears related to perfectionism. Big optimists believe that if lofty goals are achievable, then they are the ones to achieve them. It is a part of their success-seeking nature.
Success needs a pursuit of excellence, but this sprint of pursuit can become a perfectionist’s marathon.
People with strong perfectionism can go into depression at the perception or anticipation of failures (Frost et al., 1990).
Optimism doesn’t predict happiness. You can be happy now and yet see the future as bleak (low optimism). Or, you can be unhappy at present and yet see the future as bright (high optimism).
3. Delusions of Success
The vast majority of business initiatives fail. The reason, as Dan Lovallo and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman found, is that managers make overly optimistic projections.
See the following example of glass-half-full managers having delusions of success:
Organizational pressures and cognitive biases make them approve risky investments. They lull themselves into believing that the likely benefits far outweigh the possible pitfalls.
This type of forecasting is what psychologists call the planning fallacy, the same mistake that directs procrastinators. It makes the executives make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than a rational analysis of the risks.
Furthermore, the optimists may be deserters.
Optimists are more likely to leave projects midway, expecting others to fill in for them. Their thinking is like this: since they have already done half the job, others can do the rest easily. While they can go do something else.
So the glass-half-full people tend to wish hard, and then work even harder to make that wish come true.
4. Overoptimism
Another problem with the glass-half-full people is that they tend to put a positive and optimistic spin on any given situation. This makes them prone to exhibit Overoptimism: When Optimism Stops Being A Happiness Magnet.
Overoptimism, or a pervasive optimistic bias, can distort reality and make a person feel special, gifted, and entitled. An example was Steve Jobs, whose success at Apple made him believe (until it was too late) that he could cure his cancer through herbal and acupuncture treatments.
Everyone who sees a glass as half-full is not overly optimistic, but the risk runs higher.
In his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman said that “people tend to be overly optimistic about their relative standing on any activity in which they do moderately well.”
Benefits of Being A Glass-Half-Full Person
- Lewina O Lee (2019) found that optimism can increase lifespan by 11 to 15%. They also linked it to a greater chance of achieving “exceptional longevity,” that is, living to the age of 85 or beyond.
- Alan Rozanski (2019) found that higher levels of optimism correlate with a 35% lower risk of heart-related events and higher longevity.
- Laura Kubzansky (2001) found that an optimistic style of explaining things may protect against the risk of coronary heart disease in older men. The study was aptly named, “Is the glass half empty or half full?”
- Alexander Vaiserman (2021) found that pessimism may be linked with faster telomere shortening, a biomarker of cellular aging, while optimism could slow down this process.
How To Answer “Are You A Glass-Half-Full Person?”
Here’s the fun part: let’s explore the question, “Are You a Glass-Half-Full Person?” from three different perspectives.
A physics guy’s take on it: A glass on Earth never remains empty; it’s always full. When it is filled up to half with water, the other half contains air.
Here’s how a minimalist sees it: If the glass is half-full and serves your needs, then you may not need to fill it to the full. Why greed for more? If the glass is half-empty, you may leave the empty part for others to fill. Why occupy space more than you require?
“Minimalism” is a lifestyle of owning and keeping only those things that add value and meaning to your life, while discarding the rest.
This is how a philosopher may argue: The question posed is itself a false dilemma, and the answer is within, rooted in realism.
- “Realism” is talking of unchangeable facts; e.g., the moon takes 28 days to go around the Earth.
- “False dilemma” is when you wrongly box any issue within two-limit options, e.g., “If you are not with me, then you are against me,” without considering the person might be a fence-sitter.
Final Words
The glass-half-full people look for the silver lining in dark clouds.
25% of our optimistic temperament is genetic, which we inherit from our parents. We can’t do much about it.
However, we can learn and shape the other 75% of our optimism through social mechanisms, such as attachments to friends and family (Meevissen, 2011).
√ Also Read: 3 Stoic Ways To Make Bold Choices (When Fear Holds You Back)
√ Please share this with someone.
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