Oliver Burkeman: The Negative Path to Happiness and Success
“Get motivated!” and “stay positive!” are common bits of self-help advice. But have we gone too far in our penchant for positivity? Leaning on research (including a story about Mount Everest climbers), reporter and author Oliver Burkeman shares the counterintuitive insight of how abandoning goals and allowing some negativity in can actually be helpful.
“Theres a real benefit to finding ways to loosen our grip as goal driven people. When you look at successful entrepreneurs…you find they don’t follow this stereotype.” Instead, Burkeman says, we should remain ready to adapt where we are heading and the embrace uncertainty that scares us.
Oliver Burkeman is a British author and journalist living in Brooklyn. His most recent book is The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (2012), which looks at the upsides of uncertainty, failure and imperfection, exploring unconventional approaches to flourishing everywhere from the barrios of Mexico City to the world’s largest collection of failed consumer products. He writes a popular weekly column for The Guardian on social psychology, productivity and the science of happiness, which formed the basis of his 2011 book, Help! How To Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire and Slate.
The Antidote
The Guardian Columns
@oliverburkeman
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I have to agree. Letting in a little negativity offers a perspective that allows you to see the flaws in things you might not otherwise see.
I achieved more success moving to LA with no job, no expectations, and a positive attitude than I did in NY with a driven goal and strategic plan. Positivity in my opinion is always vital, no matter if you have set goals or not. Uncertainty however is what we all should embrace. It creates authentic motivation, vision, and allows us to actually innovate. It’s allows us to live “in the moments”, versus “in the clouds” and open up true creativity. If one can’t see a positive light in a negative situation, they’ll forever be distracted from what’s truly important in their life, hence attracting false positives, greed, money, and ultimately unhappiness. Anyone can achieve whatever they want, but the question is do they actually know what they really want?
Your comment does a great job supporting this guy’s thesis. People who are negative attract money? If anyone could achieve anything, there would be no poor people in this world. A little negativity might help you check your logic.
Same ideas that i teach my reader at www.igetfast.com
myopic positivity or myopic negativity is simply the culprit of stupidity.
which is why simplistic aphorisms and truisms which make up 99% of “online information” that constitute the internet are inherently stupid.
this article, indicative of the many that make up “the internet” is just that, and the epitome of stupidity.
Articles like this prove it. It is somehow considered insightful to point out that “allowing some negativity can actually be helpful”.
Do you know how overwhelmingly stupid, trite, and such-a-generality-as-to-be-completely-useless this type of information is?
Additionally, there’s more “about the author” information in this article than their is actual attempted-info, this of course is disregarding how generally useless the very scarce information that is present, actually is helpful/meaningful/insightful.
This is product placement, pure and simple.
The new age we live in is still dominated by advertising, capital agendas, and rampant, RAMPANT, mediocrity.
The Internet is largely a fools game. Actually I take that back it IS a fool’s game. The 0.0001% of quality, novel, and challenging work does not overcome the 99.9999% of sophomoric blither.
Mediocrity. Nothing more. Nothing less either, sadly, which preys on the human compulsion for information and learning. Just like religion once did. Now the information highway does as well. But in an explosion and incitement of knowledge, no longer useful, irrevocably productive, and present, like trash, litter, global-warming.