Minifesto: Aggressive Optimism

Gapingvoid put out a call for people to submit their own "minifestos", which are highly distilled manifestos with a word count under 500. I had meant to do a post on my concept of aggressive optimism for a long time now, so this minifesto thread was the perfect opportunity to dust off that idea and put on some polish. Looking over these, it's clear to me that the NLP presuppositions have had some influence on my approach to life, along with observations made along the journey of life.

Aggressive Optimism Minifesto

Optimism is derived from “optimize” which is a VERB.

Aggressive optimism works far beyond a mere passive positive mental attitude.

Continuously fine-tune yourself, your environment, and the relationship in-between.

You exist in a system along with your perceived and unperceived environment, and all parts of the system are interrelated. Affect any part of the system, and the system changes.

The world is a laboratory, and failure is just an experimental result. The life consequences might be very painful, but it can be a goldmine of information to the open mind.

Avoid the pitfalls of perfectionism. Ideals are necessary, but don’t get paralyzed by being overly particular.

People make mistakes; get over it.

Work with a set of core values. Relativism is useful in some contexts, but strong core values fuel aggressive optimism. I suggest gratitude, honesty, love, and spirituality as a starting point.

The mind is a powerful aspect of the human being regardless of supposed intelligence or lack thereof. Simple critical thinking skills along with far-flung creativity even at a basic level will get you far beyond most people’s performance.

As cool and as useful as changing perceptions can be, truth and reality don’t actually change along with them. Develop an epistemology and constantly refine and challenge it.