The student in question (an advisee of mine from a previous school) would want me to point out that he did, in fact, make the basket.īut as we get older, we are less optimistic. Besides, of course, breaking both his arms. Over a decade of working in schools has provided me with plenty of examples of the pitfalls of optimism bias, but the one that sticks out in my memory is the student who decided to dunk a basketball by jumping off a chair. Optimism bias leads you to believe that nothing bad could possibly happen to you, no matter what you do. We are also, however, prone to optimism bias–a tendency to underestimate the likelihood that we will experience negative consequences as a result of our actions. There is a fair amount of research pointing to the idea that humans are hard-wired for optimism–to believe that everything’s going to turn out okay for us. I started having text exchanges that looked like this: Very few people reacted to it on Facebook, but the next day at school a colleague looked at me and said, “Relentless.” And I said, “Relentless.” And then it took on a life of its own. ![]() But as little as I understand about how I came up with that phrase, I am even more baffled by how and why it caught on. I don’t know why that phrase came into my head. All I can point to is a status update on Facebook. I wish I could point to some major life event, some epiphany, some moment of insight that came after intense struggle or deep self-reflection. ![]() I wish I had some grand origin story to share. People often ask me where my motto of Relentless Optimism came from, and what it means. In fact, I gave a few to some folks at the the AISL conference, and they encouraged me to share what I’d written about relentless optimism with the readers of the AISL blog. There’s one on my laptop, one on my phone, and one on my water bottle–and usually a small stash of them in my bag that I hand out to people. ![]() Most people who have spent time with me have noticed my “Relentless Optimism” stickers.
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