Be realistic!

So Joey likes to read self-improvement books, and one of these books had an optimism/pessimism test in it. It is a pretty inter­est­ing test com­prised of 48 ques­tions. Each ques­tion has two pos­si­ble answers, and both answers are extremely sim­il­iar, mak­ing it VERY hard to “cheat” on the test. Each answer is assigned either a 1 or a 0, and a three let­ter code. Once you fin­ish answer­ing the ques­tions, you add up the 1’s for each three let­ter code, giv­ing you 6 num­bers in 2 cat­e­gories. (Sounds com­pli­cated, but once you do it once, it makes sense.) One cat­e­gory is pes­simistic, and one cat­e­gory is opti­mistic. You can then add up the optimistic’s and sub­tract the pessimistic’s to get your over­all score. A high num­ber, like 10, means you are very opti­mistic. A low num­ber, like 0, means you are very very pessimistic.

I scored –4.

And then a few days later I took it again. I scored –6.

So obvi­ously I’m not Mr. Opti­mism, but this isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing. You see, those 3 cat­e­gories can say a lot about you.

The first cat­e­gory is… ummm… I for­got what this one is called. Basi­cally, my score indi­cated that I feel that if one thing goes wrong, every­thing is going to go wrong. And in the real world, this is often right. If, for exam­ple, your billing sec­re­tary quits, then you prob­a­bly have more prob­lems than just a miss­ing billing sec­re­tary. You now have more work­load for your other employ­ees. You have upset cus­tomers receiv­ing a lower qual­ity of ser­vice. You’ll have a harder time get­ting things going again with the new sec­re­tary because their ini­tial work­load is going to be so heavy. Get my point?

At first, this may appear to be a bad thing. But if you EXPECT every­thing to go to crap, then you can pre­pare for it and min­i­mize the damage.

The sec­ond cat­e­gory is per­manance (I think thats what it is called). My score indi­cated that although bad things do hap­pen, they don’t last for­ever. So going back to the billing sec­re­tary exam­ple, I rec­og­nize that even­tu­ally things will get fixed, and this pro­vides a ray of hope.

The third cat­e­gory is self-… ummm… blame? Man I suck at remem­ber­ing names. Any­ways, my score indi­cated that when bad things hap­pen, I blame myself. Again, this may seem bad at first, but it is a VERY good thing, in my opin­ion. If I make a web­page for you and it gets hacked because of a mis­take on my part, would you pre­fer I blame myself or blame you?

So really, the scores you want depend on what field of work you are in. As a com­puter per­son, when things do go to crap, and they do even­tu­ally get bet­ter, and when my apps break it is my fault, my scores are perfect.

Well, maybe a few points low.