The power of positive (and negative) thinking

Through most of my life I’ve been an optimist.  I tend to see things with a hopeful eye.  Vivian, on the other hand, often sees the depressing problems.  A sign of a healthy marriage is we know our differences and often joke about them (and probably our respective attitudes balance to create a realistic perspective).

My positive attitudes, in part, were shaped when my parents, desperate to teach me some rudimentary social skills, sent me to the Dale Carnegie Public Speaking Course at age 17.  At the time, I was the youngest program graduate.  I learned not to be afraid to speak in front of audiences. I also discovered I didn’t have fear in doing rather risky things like, a few years later, arriving in Liberia a week after a military coup where the soldiers beheaded the former political leaders and stuck their skulls on beachfront poles. One night in Monrovia, I spent a drunken evening in a commandeered taxi with a soldier, who at night’s end, wanted my watch.  I declined to give it to him.  I solved the problem by defying him in the very busy lobby of the town’s five-star hotel.  My real accommodations were, of course, much more modest.  The room even had a slow rotating fan on the ceiling.  Right out of those old African movies.

However, I couldn’t say “hi” to someone who knew me and I still have real troubles recognizing faces and names.   It took me a long time to work through things to reach some level of normal functioning.  In other words, I’m a social basket case.  I’ve compensated for my lack of people skills and social relationship capacities with my writing skills and some healthy internal attitudes.  One is, I can poke fun at my own weaknesses.  The second is, the lines from the Dale Carnegie Course stuck in my head like glue:  “Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.”

I follow these rules by never bad-mouthing the competition, no matter how bad they are.  As a rule, you will never find a blog posting on this site that attacks an individual or organization.

There are always exceptions.  What if a reader decides to slag someone specific, for example?  Well, a few days ago, Rick Pratt had a few words to say about the Bobby Darnell’s blog, which received the most votes in the Best Construction Blog competition.  I received Pratt’s permission to publish his email and it has stirred up lots of response.

You can see some of the response on this RemodelCrazy.com forum thread.

Did Pratt err in speaking his negative opinions?  Well, he certainly attracted a lot of visitors to both his own profile and his friend’s blog site.

It’s not my style. My reading (and  Dale Carnegie’s teachings) is that this sort of negativity isn’t good practice, but, heck, Pratt’s blunt and less-than-positive posting certainly attracted a lot of attention.  So maybe being negative isn’t that bad, after all.