A bit about religion

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

"You seem like such a pessimist!" laughed someone whose opinion I deeply respect, catching me laughing off guard during today conversation about how to be happy heating the wall with your head.

The irony wasn't lost on me - my partner asked over the weekend why I pursue stupidly impossible goals with what she calls "stupid, irrational optimism.". These contrasting perceptions perfectly capture the paradox I've spent years trying to understand.

The truth is, in business, being labeled a pessimist is often a death sentence.
Markets reward optimists, and history remembers the dreamers who dared to challenge conventional wisdom. But there's a crucial distinction between blind optimism and what I've come to call pragmatic optimism - my personal religion.

Years ago, I came across a Russian phrase that perfectly captured this idea: "слабоумие и отвага" - which roughly translates to "foolishness and courage." At first, it seemed like just another internet meme, something you'd laugh at and forget. But the phrase stuck with me, because it illuminated something profound about success in complex systems.

You see, in Russian culture, this phrase isn't just about being foolishly brave. It's about that special kind of optimism that makes you try things that "sensible" people would never attempt. The kind that makes you look at an impossible problem and think "well, why not give it a shot?" while everyone else is listing reasons why it can't be done.

This isn't blind optimism though - that's where most people get it wrong. It's a combination of seemingly irrational courage with ruthlessly practical execution. This combination leads to what I call the Pragmatist's Paradox: In complex systems, unreasonable optimism combined with rigorous pragmatism produces better results than "rational" analysis alone.

Consider how complex systems actually work. When you're dealing with difficult challenges - whether in business, research, or life - the probability of success isn't just unknown, it's unknowable in advance. Traditional analysis falls apart because the very act of pursuing something changes what's possible.

Think about the Wright brothers. When they were working on powered flight, leading physicists had "proved" it was impossible. Their calculations weren't wrong - they were incomplete. The pessimist's analysis was locally correct but globally wrong.

This is why I've come to see pragmatic optimism as my religion. Not because it requires faith - quite the opposite. It's a belief system built on four fundamental principles:

Reality is the ultimate arbiter
Evidence trumps theory
Iteration beats perfection
Optimism is a tool

These principles create something more powerful than their parts would suggest. In complex systems, the space of possible outcomes isn't fixed - it expands with exploration. When someone says something is impossible, they're usually right about why their specific imagined solution won't work. But they're often spectacularly wrong about the possibility space that exists beyond their analysis.

The Wright brothers weren't just optimistic; they were pragmatic optimists. They combined unreasonable goals with systematic testing. This pattern repeats across every major breakthrough. The pessimist can prove why specific approaches won't work, but they can't prove that no approach will work.

This framework makes testable predictions. It suggests that in any field, people who combine unreasonable optimism with systematic pragmatism will achieve more than pure rationalists or pure optimists and totally they achieve something compare to pessimist. Looking at history, this prediction holds remarkably well. From scientific breakthroughs to technological innovations, the biggest advances come from this combination.

Critics might argue this isn't really a religion. But I think that misses the point. A belief system should be judged by its results, not its categorization. Pragmatic optimism is self-correcting: if it stops working, pragmatism itself tells you to try something else.

That's the real power of pragmatic optimism: it keeps you searching for better solutions even when conventional wisdom says you've reached the limit. It expands the possible state space of solutions. In practical terms - it works.

So when people mistake my pragmatism for pessimism, or when my partner questions my "irrational" optimism, I understand the confusion. But I've learned to wear these contradictions as a badge of honor. Because in complex systems, possibility spaces are larger than they appear, and the act of searching creates new solutions that couldn't have been predicted in advance.

That Russian phrase - "слабоумие и отвага" - isn't just a clever saying. It's a reminder that some of the most important breakthroughs in history came from people who were just foolish enough to try what everyone else thought impossible, but practical enough to find a way to make it work.

But what I realized today, thanks to that candid feedback, is that if someone perceives you as a pessimist - that's something you need to fix. Perception matters deeply, especially in business and leadership. While my internal framework might be built on pragmatic optimism, if it comes across as pessimism to others, that's my challenge to address. Thank you, K, for that eye-opening perspective. Will buy some speciality coffee pack next time I see you.