Almost always look on the bright side of life

Almost always look on the bright side of life
几乎永远要看向积极的一面
It pays to be an optimist. Upbeat types tend to be in better health. They also tend to be resilient. Optimists are likely to see setbacks as temporary and attributable to external circumstances, whereas pessimists regard reverses as a verdict on their own enduring weaknesses.
心态乐观是有好处的。乐观的人往往健康状况更好。乐观的人往往也更坚韧。乐观主义者倾向于将挫折视为暂时的，并归因于外部环境，而悲观主义者则将逆境看作是对自身永久弱点的定论。
Optimists are more likely to rise up organisational ladders as well. In a recent paper Nadine Chochoiek of Munich Business School and her co-authors surveyed founders, bosses and employees in the Netherlands, and found that entrepreneurs and managers are as upbeat as each other. Both are more optimistic than employees.
乐观的人也更有可能在组织中晋升。在最近的一篇论文中，慕尼黑商学院的纳汀·科黑伊克及其合著者对荷兰的创始人、老板、员工进行了调查，发现企业家和管理者一样乐观。这两者都比员工更为乐观。
Optimists are more likely than pessimists to be entrepreneurs. Low expectations of success and a decision to found a business tend not to go together. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel-prizewinning psychologist, described "delusional optimism" as an engine of capitalism.
乐观主义者比悲观主义者更有可能成为企业家。对成功的低期望与创办企业的决定往往不会同时出现。获得诺贝尔奖的心理学家丹尼尔·卡尼曼将“妄想性乐观”描述为资本主义的引擎。
Confidence, justified or not, is a big part of why people are chosen for bigger jobs within organisations. The standard psychological test for measuring how optimistic or pessimistic people are is a short questionnaire called the Revised Life Orientation Test, which features statements like "If something can go wrong for me, it will". Would you follow someone who strongly believes that they are cursed?
自信，无论是否合理，都是人们在组织中被选任更重要职位的一个重要原因。衡量人们乐观或悲观程度的标准心理测试是一份简短的问卷，名为“修订版生活态度取向测试”，其中包括一些陈述，例如“如果某事可能在我这里出错，那么它一定会出错”。你愿意追随一个坚信自己被诅咒的人吗？
Optimism can plainly go too far. Within organisations excessive optimism often causes trouble. Unrealistic starting expectations make it more likely that projects will miss budgets and deadlines, for instance.
乐观显然也可能走向极端。在组织内部，过度乐观常常引发问题。例如，不切实际的起始预期使得项目更有可能超出预算和错过截止日期。
Optimism also makes it less likely that failing projects will be canned; decision-makers have a habit of assuming better outcomes than originally planned to justify ploughing on.
乐观主义也使得失败的项目不太可能被叫停，决策者习惯于假设比最初计划的更好的结果，以此来证明继续推进的合理性。
There are plenty of ideas on how to counter optimism bias. Processes can help-in a "pre-mortem", for example, people deliberately imagine the failure of a proposed initiative and identify the most likely causes.
关于如何对抗乐观偏见，已有诸多观点。流程可以提供帮助——例如，在“事前剖析”中，人们会刻意设想一项提议失败，并找出最可能的原因。
Team composition also matters. A paper by Ulrike Malmendier of the University of California, Berkeley and her co-authors found that overoptimism on the part of the CFO is more predictive than a cocksure CEO when it comes to a preference for debt over equity. But the same paper found that overconfident CEOs tend to hire overconfident CFOs. If it's optimists all the way down, you have a problem.
团队构成同样重要。加州大学伯克利分校的乌尔里克·马尔门迪尔及其合著者的一篇论文发现，首席财务官的过度乐观比过于自信的CEO更能预测该公司偏好债务而非资产。但同一篇论文还发现，过度自信的CEO倾向于雇佣过度自信的CFO。如果全都是乐观主义者，那你就有麻烦了。