Entire organizations are kept alive and kicking by the glass-half-full-people whilst the glass-half-empty-people spend their time feeling sorry for themselves.
The reality is the same for both types. One of them drive the future, the other is anchored in either complaining about the present or blaming the past. A team of glass-half-full people can deal with challenges, cope with limitations and conduct a search for opportunities.
Where are those people? Most likely around you or in front of you. It’s not as simple as looking for the optimists and the extroverts. These people build strategies with not-100-per-cent-perfect-data; see the opportunities when others see shortcomings; and, one of my favourite types that I keep talking about, they get things done first even if in a broken process and then step back and try to fix the process, in that order.
The glass is probably never full anyway (I know, I know, clever people say it is always full at least of air, thanks) so it is always interesting to know what side of the content people are.
One of my favourite diagnostic kits has to do with time. Time being the same for a group of people, some say ‘there is no much time for this, only 2 hours’, whilst others say ‘we have as much as 2 hours to do this’. Both have two hours.
As both have the same glass, the same reality. Funny enough, both the glass-always-half-empty people and the glass-always-half-full people, are paid the same. How come?
Is this affiliation to one side of the content natural? Who knows. What I can certify is that the perception of the glass is significantly filtered by your peers.
A working environment in which the default position is to call out all the time ‘what we don’t have’ (we don’t have the money, we are not that kind of company, we are not mature enough, we are not entrepreneurial, we don’t have the proper processes and systems) is as contagious as the opposite.
If you hire lots of glass-always-half-empty people and you put them to work together, don’t expect miracles of collective positivism. Social transplant of active members of the opposite tribe is the only solution.
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