Counterpoint: Being Positive is Not The Opposite of Being Negative
Yesterday I wrote a post answering the question is there a secret to success. One of the points I made was that successful people avoid negative thoughts and negative people. Given that, I thought today it would be appropriate for me to address a common fallacy related to negativity.
Most people think that being positive is the opposite of being negative. This seems like the obvious answer, however this is not necessarily correct. Positivity is an opposite of negativity but not “the” opposite. At least when it comes to negative thoughts and negative people.
When it comes to negative thoughts and negative people, the opposite of negativity is the absence of negativity. What’s more, the absence of negativity doesn’t necessarily mean positivity. The absence of negativity in this case is simply being neutral.
In many situations the reality may be that there is truly nothing to be positive about. For example, getting a flat tire, breaking a bone, struggling to pay bills, losing in a big competition are all situations where being positive in those moments would likely require faking it. However, you can still avoid being negative in those moments without faking positivity by simply being neutral.
Being Neutral Over Being Positive
Neutral thinking is being a realist without letting the negativity of what you can’t control impact the reality of what you can control. To put it another way, when you approach an undesirable situation with neutral thinking, you focus on sticking with the facts. Facts that are not positive or negative, they just are. Then you deal with those facts by doing whatever it takes to move forward with the time and resources you have available in that moment.
The benefit of training yourself to default to neutral thinking rather than positive thinking, is that you never have to fake being neutral. The problem with positive thinking is that sometimes you have to fake it to truly be positive. Your inner-self knows when you’re faking it and this minimizes the benefits of not being negative.