After writing about Trump and destructive positive thinking, I thought it useful to write about constructive positive thought. So here goes.

Real positive thinking

With persistance and learning, it is amazing what people can achieve.

Learning is vital and requires interaction with the world and occasional failure. If I cannot fail I cannot learn.

  • Think of how often young children fall over when they try to walk, or how often they make garbled noise or confused statements when they try to speak. Yet they get on with it, and almost everyone succeeds.

Most problems are not insurmountable, but if they seem insurmountable perhaps they can be bypassed? Perhaps I can do something different and more effective?

Perhaps I can learn from someone else?

People who point out problems, don’t have to be believed at face value, but they may need to be thanked, especially if they have experience and I can learn from them.

Cliche: every problem presents opportunities… for learning.

I don’t know how things will turn out or how the process will work in advance. I should let things flow once I’ve started. (If you are religious then think about leaving the end place to God)

Some things are improbable and possibly doable. Some things are physically impossible. It is good to be able to distinguish them – choose something possible to begin with.

  • For Example, it is improbable in the extreme that you will become a skillful and famous ballet dancer if you first start training at 50. However, you might become a good dancer, or you might enjoy dancing, you might found a new type of dance – all of which are worthwhile. In the current world you cannot peddle your way from Moscow to the Moon. You cannot bring back the dead. You cannot build a perpetual motion machine. You cannot regrow your chopped off legs by will power but you might still be able to live a fully satisfying life. We cannot continue our current ‘developed world’ lives as they are, without catastrophe, but we can perhaps change to something better.

I can work with my materials not against them. I don’t command the world, it is what it is. There are always limits. Sometimes we don’t know what those limits are. Sometimes we do, and sometimes we only think we do.

My thinking shows me the world I experience and interpret. Therefore I need to learn the most useful and accurate thinking I can get, and that usually involves getting things wrong and correcting myself.

I might think I have succeeded, only to find its another learning experience. That’s fine.

Total success and dominance are not the point!

Life involves surprise! That’s wonderful and adds to my creativity.

False positive thinking

I can do anything without fail.

I know everything already.

Everything is easy, or should be easy, if I think right.

Problems do not exist. All problems are unreal, and I should not think about them, as that attracts more problems.

People who point out problems are enemies trying to pull me down.

The world is whatever I think it is. I shape the whole world to be what I want.

Everything will work out exactly as I have planned it, and if it doesn’t I just reassert that it will happen that way and only that way.

I’m the greatest!

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Real positive thinking is realistic. Keep going, keep learning and keep changing.