I always considered myself an optimist, and I never understood why someone would want to be a pessimist. Why would you want to make yourself unhappy?
I remember working with a very likable older gentleman who was our company’s engineering advisor and a local university professor. By the way he spoke and acted, I assumed he was an optimist until one day I heard him say, “An optimist is just a pessimist without enough experience.” That started my path of reexamining my thoughts on pessimism.
Recently, an old colleague of mine, who is definitely a pessimist, told me an interesting story. Before I worked with him, he was hired as a temp accountant in a company. As he gained some understanding of the business and went through its books, he found something odd and looked into it further. There was a way to save the company a lot of money in taxes each year.
He showed his boss, who immediately brought him to the president to explain his findings. The president offered him a full-time position on the spot at $80,000 per year. This was around the year 2000. The anomaly he found had to do with the inventory they carried and how some items would take years to sell, but they would still have to pay taxes on them. His findings would save the company millions each year.
When he told me that story, I thought, “Well, that’s what a pessimist does.” They don’t just go along or assume, like an optimist would. They seem to smell problems. The bad ones will just complain, but the good ones, like my friend, will dig into them to uncover the issues.
We wouldn’t want everybody to be a pessimist, but you need to have them in your company, don’t you think? People might get annoyed with them, but you can see the value of having intelligent, tenacious pessimists in any company.
I can just see the HR questionnaires now, “Is this coffee cup half full or half empty?”