Chuck Bryan

Or do you not smoke and eat better because you have a positive outlook?

There's a whole chicken and the egg thing.

I just coined that phrase, but I think it's going to stick around.

Then there's something called optimism bias, which I thought was pretty interesting.

As a human race, we have an optimism bias.

They've studied it to death and they found that just for the general population, the default is about 80 percent of people are generally optimistic.

10 percent are generally pessimistic and about 10 percent can go either way or maybe you're neutral.

And there was a psychologist named Neil Weinstein.

I think this is in the very early 1980s.

Yeah, 1980 was his initial study where he was the first guy to say, yeah, I mean, we're pretty much biased toward being optimist.

And, you know, one reason may be because it's so shoved down your throat that that's the key to everything good in life, you know.

Yeah, maybe.

What Weinstein, I'm going with Weinstein, but I get Weinstein too.

Yeah.

I think one thing that his study, it was a landmark study from what I could tell in 1980, he tested, I think, 200 students and said, okay, of these positive things and of these negative things, what is the likelihood it'll happen to you and what is the likelihood it'll happen to your classmates?

And just across the board, students said that positive things were much more likely to happen to them than to their classmates.

Negative things were much more likely to happen to their classmates than to them.

And we're talking things like liking your post-graduation job or your house doubling in value in five years.

Or this one, I love this one, your achievements being written up in the newspaper.

Like all those things were much likelier to happen to the test taker than they were to their fellow students.