'Cheerfulness is an achievement, and hope is something
to celebrate.
If optimism is important, it’s because many
outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an
important ingredient of success.
This flies in the face of the elite view that
talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the
difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our
sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of
our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope.
Today’s problems are rarely created by people
taking too sunny a view of things; it is because the troubles of the world are
so continually brought to our attention that we need tools that can preserve our
hopeful dispositions.'
p. 16
Alain de Botton, John Armstrong
Art as Therapy
The School of Life
