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Image Credit: Katya Wolf via Pexels
Years ago, I added the phrase “optimistic creativity” to my signature speech, “’Impossible’ Is a Dare!” I’ve always felt that’s the sweet spot where meaningful change happens. Optimists are motivated to find solutions because we understand that change is possible. Creatives push the limits of what we see as possible, in part because they have an inner voice seeing “possible” as something that can grow and morph—but also because they see change as necessary, even crucial.
Ritchie blames “doomer culture” for disempowering people to the point where too many choose apathy instead of action because they feel they can’t have the impact they need to have. She starts off with a list of eight major positive trends (all of which, in my opinion, stem from optimistic creativity) and then points out why doomer culture itself is doomed to fail: “Scaring people into action doesn’t work…for almost any issue… To contend with environmental crises and make life better for everyone, we need the right kind of optimists: those who recognize that the world will only improve if we fight for it.”
Then comes many consultants’ perennial favorite, a four-part matrix. Her left axis rates the level of optimism, while the top measures people’s perceptions of the ability to make change. The sweet spot is the intersection of optimism and impact: “The future can be better if we work hard to change it.” She dismisses as ineffectual the denizens of the other three quadrants:
- “The future will be better; it’ll all work out fine” (“complacent optimists” who don’t see the need to do the work)
- “We’re doomed and need to take extreme action to protect ourselves” (pessimists who nevertheless believe in the power to create impact)
- “We’re doomed and there’s nothing we can do about it” (pessimists who don’t think they can have impact)
Let’s look at how optimistic creativity has changed the world, in a relative nanosecond across human history. When I was born in 1956, the world was a very different place. The Internet didn’t exist, and the few institutions and businesses that could afford an enormously expensive computer had to devote special rooms to massive equipment operated by special technicians who “spoke” punch card. A day-rate long-distance phone call (on a tethered landline with an actual dial) between New York and California cost $3.70 for the first three minutes—that’s $40.92 in today’s dollars.
It wasn’t just that we didn’t have portable devices that could access the world’s entire base of written or taped knowledge and experience in seconds and also let us call people anywhere in the world at no cost. Hunger and poverty were rampant around the world. In the US and many parts of Europe, most women were denied professional careers and many professions excluded people of color. In the rest of the world, even the lands where people of color were a majority, discrimination was at least as widespread—and in some places, including South Africa, Rhodesia, and the American South, seriously repressive racism was the law of the land and integral to the culture. Vast areas, including the entire former Soviet Union as well as much of Latin America and Asia, strained under totalitarian governments that routinely violated human rights while funneling much of their nations’ wealth to the already super-wealthy.
On energy, renewables now account for 29 percent of global production, according to Ritchie, and she expects that number to increase rapidly, noting the dramatic fall in prices for solar and wind. It’s worth noting that it’s already increasing exponentially, from just 941 terawatt hours in 1965 to 2280 in 1990, and then zooming up in the past 31 years to 7493. That’s 8x in less than 60 years. Even the experts didn’t predict this rapid growth. And Ritchie is one of many experts who expects fossil fuels to wane even more quickly in the future.
Even as recently as 1990, more than a third of the world’s humans lived in “extreme poverty”: less than USD $2.15 per day. Yet, by 2019, that third had dropped to less than 10 percent. While the pandemic set the UN’s hunger and poverty goals back considerably, I would still call that one of the greatest achievements in human history.
We could keep going, discussing sector after sector: medicine, physics, astronomy, agriculture, circular economy (repurposing waste to use again), biomimicry (learning how to solve engineer challenges from nature), and so much more. In all of them, someone—or a bunch of someones—believed that things could be better and took initiative to make that happen.
And how are YOU harnessing or generating optimistic creativity in your life, your work, and your commitment to benefit the world?
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