Is It Time To End ‘Positive Thinking’?
I love Jon Acuff. I love his work, his books, his podcasts, and most of all, his humor. And so it pains me to say this, but today’s post is about proving him wrong.
THE HEADLINE: Avoid Positive Thinking at all costs. It’s a hoax.
Scrape the memes off your timelines, unless it’s the one with the inspirational quote and the cat hanging onto the string. Keep that one; it's cute.
Positive Thinking sounds inspirational, but in the long run, it comes with a misery guarantee.
To Think Positive is to spin the facts.
When we promote a specific type of thinking, we are by default discouraging other forms of thought.
When we pick a lens or filter, we’ve removed thinking from the equation before we've even started. It’s not thinking; it’s just a mashup of imagination and hallucination.
Positive Thinking, as we see it every day, is built on lies.
So, Jon Acuff, Zig Ziglar, Seth Godin, and everyone else are WRONG!
There I said it on the record. Now people can tweet it and create a cinematic moment where we all meet somewhere in Nashville or New York for an Anchorman-styled street fight wearing polyester suits with huge collars.
Now that I’ve set the record straight, I want to go on the record and say…. Jon Acuff, Zig Ziglar, Seth Godin, and all those other voices are CORRECT.
When they speak of Positive Thinking, they are focused on what is true, imploring us to name the lies we tell ourselves and return to reality.
The only filter they want is a reality filter, or if you are a TRU TV viewer, an actuality filter.
SO WAIT! Did I just call people out and agree with them in the same post? YES.
Did I do that because I’m a generational Boomer? No. (That would’ve been funny, though.)
The Positive Thinking that fills our timelines starts by denying what’s true.
“You can do anything.” No, no, you can’t do anything.
You can’t fly.
You can’t live without sleep.
You can’t watch an episode of Ted Lasso without laughing so hard you pee yourself a little.
Okay, maybe you can, but it's freaking hard to do.
You can’t undo the past, and you can’t move forward by acting as though the past didn’t happen.
I don’t think the idea that Acuff, Ziglar, Godin, and others teach is Positive Thinking at all.
I think we should call it Hopeful Thinking.
Not wishful or wistful for those reading this with furrowed eyebrows and wrinkled foreheads… that’s right, I’m talking to you, Eugene Levy.
If I choose to interpret an event or idea as positive only, I have to either ignore the negative or distort the whole thing. Now I’m living a lie.
Hope doesn’t demand interpretation. It doesn’t filter things out. Hope simply acknowledges what is true while also rejecting what isn’t true.
I can’t change my past, but I can shape my future. TRUE.
My past has shaped me, but it does not define me. TRUE.
My capacity to grow, learn, and change is only limited by my desire and discipline. TRUE.
Expertise is something everyone learns, and no one is born with. TRUE.
Innate abilities and gifts are just head starts, but at some point, everyone has to struggle. TRUE.
My life can be impacted and affected, but it will always be mine to direct. TRUE.
In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins shares a quote from Admiral Jim Stockdale. Collins asked Stockdale how he survived cut off from the world, tortured and imprisoned, as a Vietnam POW.
Stockdale responded, “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.”
Hopeful Thinking is the practice of anchoring my motivations, goals, and dreams in reality, both good and bad, and in faith in something bigger than myself.
Faith is the evidence of things hoped for but unseen. Faith is believing in the parts even when we cannot see the whole.
Have you ever completed a puzzle? If you did, you did so by faith. You looked at the picture, examined the pieces, and moved forward, matching the shapes and edges together, believing the final product would match the image on the box when you completed the work.
You believed, had faith in, the whole that was unseen by making an honest assessment of the pieces sitting right in front of you.
Hopeful Thinking feeds curiosity and holds space for wonder.
Hopeful Thinking anchors itself in reality while never being imprisoned by it.
Hopeful Thinking holds the positive and the negative together; understanding both are descriptions of ideas and experiences, not definitions of identity.
So get this out there, and let be known, Jon Acuff, Zig Ziglar, and Seth Godin are all wrong and entirely correct.
I only disagree with them on word choice.
TLDR: As the great philosophers of En Vogue once sang, “Free Your mind and the rest will follow.”
May you, choose hope over positivity, faith over fate. And when knocked down, know the difference between a description and a definition.
