The philosopher Daniel Dennett says that one of the occupational hazards of being a philosopher is that you get asked difficult questions at parties. Being solicited over drinks for free consultancy is, of course, commonplace. If you’re a doctor you’ll be asked to pass opinion on a dodgy knee. Plumbers are gently probed for advice on a tricky u-bend. As a comedian I was invariably asked to comment on ‘this great idea for a sitcom I’ve come up with’ and these days social gatherings are replete with aspiring writers wanting an introduction to my literary agent. But if you’re a philosopher it’s worse. As you reach for another beer you might be asked, “Go on then, what’s consciousness?” Another recurring question Daniel (and probably most philosophers) get confronted with is, “What’s the definition of happiness?”

Luckily he has an answer and it’s a good one: “Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it”.

This then is Principle Two for the successful optimist. All successful optimists have a project that is bigger than they are. By contrast, people who have a project that is the same size as themselves are invariably miserable and tedious company. Once you’ve got a bigger car/ nicer house/ television bigger than God what’s left? As so many find out, eventually the answer is a nagging emptiness accompanied by the thought, “Surely there must be more to life than this?”

Those with something bigger than themselves generally derive a deep-in-the-core happiness from whatever that is. It’s a happiness that comes from a feeling you have a place in the world. A ‘bigger than me’ project can be your family, your religion, military service or a scientific calling. You don’t have to agree with another person’s ‘bigger than me’ project but it is true that people who have them are usually more driven, positive and able to get things done as a result. This is a happiness different from the passing pleasures of a good night out or great joke, and it will not manifest itself as merriment, but its motivating power is fundamental to the successful optimist.

I must say that this principle has no moral dimension. Hitler had a ‘bigger than me’ project as did many of his followers. It’s perfectly possible that a bigger-than-me project could manifest itself as an abandonment of self to the fascist mass, just as much as it could be a worthy cause that allows you self-determination. People who get bad stuff done have many of the same guiding principles as people who get good stuff done. The crucial point is if you want to get anything done it’s important to keep your eye on the big picture and the long game – themes that will recur in later blog posts in this series.

All successful optimists, unsurprisingly, have an unashamed optimism of ambition about our future. To clarify, this is not simple wishful thinking that things will work out alright in the end, it’s optimism specifically tied to a goal – and a conviction that that goal can be reached with enough passion and hard work. It is an optimism that something can and should be done to steer things in a positive direction.

In short, successful optimists don’t feel embarrassed to say that things could be better. They have no qualms about imagining an improved world and advocating for it, no matter how much derision they may receive at the hands of the cynical. In short they are not ashamed to dream good dreams. After all, Martin Luther King did not stand on the steps of the Lincoln memorial and say, “I have a five point plan”. And his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis painted a vivid picture of a journey towards a world without racism already well in motion.

Articulating these goals brings the first test for the successful optimist. With cynicism being such an easy weapon for their opponents, successful optimists will soon have their ambition, and indeed their character, questioned. They will be accused of naivety, arrogance and stupidity, possibly all at once. And this character assassination won’t let up. In all walks of life, but especially in large organisations, successful optimists rarely triumph because of the prevailing culture, but in spite of it. I remember a cartoon placed in my cubicle on the first day of a new job for an organisation that I subsequently got fired from: it was a warning from an existing inmate. In it, three senior executives addressed the new boy. “We encourage creativity and innovation here Smith. First step: suit and tie.” The irony is that the very people trying to discourage or neuter innovators will later, in a convenient re-writing of history, offer up the achievements of these pesky optimists as proof that their organisation (or nation) has always embraced creativity and forward-thinking.

As a successful optimist many people will tell you your dreams are trivial. But they are profound. Quite simply, if you’re not prepared to dream something extraordinary you’ll never achieve anything extraordinary.

As Helen Keller said, “No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.”

The School of Life have asked me to blog for them on the 8 principles of successful optimists. I’m reposting here. Here’s the first…

It’s easy to accept the standard story of the future: that it’s all going to be rubbish, that vested interests will always win out and the best you can do is get your head down, try and beat the prevailing trend and do what you can for you and yours (even if it’s at the expense of your fellow man and the environment).

Luckily there are enough human beings out there who don’t accept this story, who believe things can change for the better and crucially do something about it. Without their input down the ages we’d all still be sitting in caves. Throughout history these, often maligned, men and women have consistently come up trumps for the rest of us. These people are called “optimists.”

Optimism is a bit of a dirty word at the moment, and of course blind optimism (that dangerous cocktail of denial and hope) deserves our disdain. But pragmatic optimists, who admit the scale of the challenges ahead of us but resolve to do something about them anyway, should have more of our support.

It’s not always easy to keep optimistic. As the famous military maxim goes “no plan survives contact with the enemy”, which is why successful military leaders give those under them the freedom to improvise, but make sure they always know what the goal is. Americans call this ‘Commander’s Intent’. What I have learnt from working with some of the people who actually get stuff done is that they all have ‘Commander’s Intent’. But they don’t call it that. Instead they say, “these are my principles” or “these are my values”. When things change or difficult decisions need to be made they refer back to their principles, their ‘Commander’s Intent’.

In my experience there are a few core principles shared by pretty much anyone who is successful in making a difference. I like to call them ‘the eight principles of successful optimists’, and I believe they can help anyone ‘learn into the curve’ as we try to forge a brighter future in this new age. I’m going explore one principle in a series of blogs here over the next couple of months.

As a fan of The School of Life you’ll be sure to recognise and embody some, but others might surprise you.

Watch this space.

A lot.

1) I’m finally getting down to sending off the proposal for my next book – an investigation into complexity, belief and how to get things done. Watch this space.

2) The League of Pragmatic Optimists is beavering away in the background for a re-launch (internationally) sometime soon… We now have chapters ready to go in Singapore, Wellington, Sydney, Madrid, London and New York (as well as a few more regional ones in the UK)…

3) An Optimist’s Tour of the Future keeps coming out in different versions and languages and I’m just off to record the audio book. It also, I’m pleased to report, keeps getting good reviews. The Spanish speaking world in particular seem to have warmed to it. Bueno!

4) We’re rebranding Flow Associates to become Lea(r)n Into the Curve – to bring all our corporate and public sector work under one banner and encourage increased serendipity in our operations

5) I have a new play, co-written with Jack Milner, that we hope is going to tour next year. If you’re super quick you can see a preview

6) The film version of Optimist’s Tour progresses at the pace that big film projects do (very slowly) but we are pleased that visual futurist Syd Mead (Bladerunner, Alien, Tron) has agreed to jointly head up the visualisation team with Roger Dean.

7) To deal with my frustration over the slowness of Hollywood I’m making another film with my good friend Andy Ross (award winning music producer and film-maker) which will see us talking to some of the coolest people on the planet and will have a much shorter production time. More to come…

Obviously, there’s lot of public speaking too – you can find where I’m speaking here.

That’s it for now…

Mark

There is now fine cottage industry in vitriolic disdain aimed at those who tout homeopathy, crystal healing, vaccine denial (and the rest), admirably spearheaded by the likes of Ben Goldacre, Simon Singh and Robin Ince over here, Penn & Teller and James Randi in the US and Sanal Edamaruku in India, who famously challenged holy man Pandit Surender Sharma to prove the claim that he could kill another human being using only mystical powers.

Edamaruku offered himself up as a willing guinea pig on live TV where Sharma spectacularly failed to shuffle his rationalist opponent off this mortal coil. Likewise, politicians who indulge in what Mark Henderson pithily calls “Evidence Abuse” in his forthcoming book Geek Manifesto should, it is argued, be subject to a public drubbing.

Irrationalism, though, is very human, and the nearest place to see someone who cherry picks evidence and is ruled more often by emotion than reason is in the mirror. Even the most outwardly rational of us harbours a festering pit of assumption, un-evidenced opinion and prejudice. Our most iconic scientists are not immune, as Michael Brooks’ recent Free Radicals brilliantly documents. On a personal note I’ve seen more than a few scientists rendered about as rational as Charlie Sheen by alcohol, love disasters or a perceived snub by a colleague.

This then is where science and critical thinking skills come in — a framework of checks and balances, putting some filters around our bug-ridden brains so that what eventually dribbles out is something approaching the truth. And let’s be honest, science has been astonishingly successful at curbing our in-built nuttiness. One can only admire how this cognitive safety harness has continually come up trumps for its nutty creators.

But is there a middle ground to be found in the snake oil wars? One that admits we all choose which irrationalities we’ll indulge in (and allows us to practice them) while admitting they may be harmful?

Here’s a suggestion. I call it the “pseudo science and quackery emissions trading scheme”. It works in a very similar fashion to carbon trading, where a cost is put on your CO2 emissions. In these schemes you can continue to emit CO2 but there is a financial consequence. The more you emit, the more you pay.

Why not then set up a similar scheme for emissions of pseudo-science? So, as a homeopath you can continue pushing your placebos, but if you claim them to be anything more you will be sent a bill at the end of each quarter calculated against a number of evidence abusing criteria — the size of your customer base, how many times you appropriate sayings from eastern philosophy without understanding them much, and your client-facing hours. The money would then be given to, say, a medical research charity.

Everyone wins. Crystal healers can carry on trading but they at least know there is now an actual financial cost to peddling nonsense (a tax that would have to be itemised on any client’s bill). Some rationalists might even begin to see practicing quacks as good thing — generating a much needed extra revenue stream for genuine medical research. And homeopaths, faith healers and crystal wizards could legitimately claim that they were now doing something to fight cancer.

In fact we could have fundraisers where rationalists actively go to homeopaths and ask to have their intellects abused. “Dilute it some more!” they might cry… knowing that for every moment the charade continues extra pennies go towards the rationalist cause.

Mark Stevenson is a writer, businessman, comedian and founder of the League of Pragmatic Optimists. His first book An Optimist’s Tour for the Future (Profile Books) is out now.

This piece first appeared in the December 2011 issue of the British Science Association‘s magazine, People & Science.

It’s a common refrain that the grand challenges facing today’s world have largely been visited upon us by the actions of corporations. The reality of globalisation (for all its benefits) coupled with vested interests and corporate greed have left many of us deeply dissatisfied and cynical about how business operates to serve itself, while remaining blind to wider environmental and social issues. But while we’re deeply aware that corporations are a large part of the problem we must also be ready to embrace their role as a large part of the solution. This is, understandably, difficult for long-term ‘deep’ greens to accept. In their eyes corporations are, and always will be, entirely self-serving, corrupt, and morally redundant. But just as new gene therapies seek to edit out mutations responsible for genetic conditions held in our cells’ DNA, so we must encourage analogous work being done in the corporate sector.

In researching An Optimist’s Tour of the Future I made a house call on the legendary John Seely Brown, former director of the Palo Alto Research Centre (famous for the invention of laser printing and graphical user interfaces). Nowadays he works independently, helping organisations adopt and adapt to new technologies. He told me a story.

“I was recently asked to suggest the innovation in the last three hundred years that had generated more wealth for mankind than anything else. I knew why I’d been asked – they pre-supposed I was going to talk about the microprocessor and I disappointed them dramatically. I said, ‘the innovation that’s generated more wealth than anything is the limited liability corporation because that enabled you to accumulate, invest and leverage your wealth but with limited liability. That is what actually unleashed the power of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, that one innovation.”

The limited liability corporation was an example of institutional innovation, a new structure for organising people and capital that has shaped our world just as fundamentally as the institutions of religion or government. But like many religious and governmental structures, corporate models of organisation appear to have fossilised in most cases – and as such have become desperately out of step with the needs of humanity and our home planet.

But slowly things are changing. Some corporations are getting it, and by ‘it’ I mean they’ve realised that, as a species, we’ve moved from being tenants on the planet to being the landlord, which means they have new responsibilities.

In May this year sportswear giant Puma, aided by the help of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the environmental research group Trucost, became the world’s first major corporation to publish a set of ‘environmental profit and loss accounts’. It has now set itself the target of reducing carbon, waste, energy and water use by 25% by 2015. Executive Chairman Jochen Zeitz said, “To continue disregarding externalities is no longer effective to the health and long-term prospects of a business, nor to our planet. We no longer have a choice but to be accountable, ethical and responsible to our environment.”

This environmental accounting is just the sort of institutional innovation we need – and in November Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent announced they will be following Puma’s example. That said, let us not for a minute suggest that any of these brands have suddenly become whiter-than-white, cuddly guardians of the biosphere (Puma’s sponsorship of Formula 1 hardly sits comfortably in this picture). But in my work with business I’ve become convinced that when some corporations talk of taking their impact on the environment into account they’re serious. The cynic in us all says ‘yeah, right’, but you know what? I’m happy if just one in ten of them are genuine. Because this is only round one. Once one of them turns in the right direction it becomes easier to steer the others. By round two, it’s a game of one in nine, by round three, a game of one in eight – and by the time 30% of an industry has moved, the rest will follow. If we got depressed about the nine out of ten, instead of fighting for the one, we’d never start. In addition when corporations and professional services companies like PwC start to take this stuff seriously they bring a set of rigorous analytical skills to bare on the green agenda. Well run businesses understand how to manage their assets and what the depreciation of those assets means for the company, whether the asset in question is a piece of machinery or an environmental resource we all depend on. It’s often hard for deep greens to swallow, but when experienced entrepreneurial and business thinkers get their green epiphany they often approach the challenges presented with a damn sight more rigour and process than a particular brand of neighbourhood treehugger. Seeing the treehugger realise that is both an amusing and painful experience. Sometimes it’s almost impossible for them accept that the suits have something to offer.

And so, in my work with corporations I’ve had a renaissance. I’ve come to realise that not every activist chains themselves to the railings (although I fully applaud those that do). Some sit in boardrooms and are quietly steering their businesses in a planet-friendly direction. My newfound heroes you will never hear about. These are people who work in businesses changing them (sometimes painfully slowly) from inside, while suffering brickbats both from colleagues of the old-school, who resist change, and external critics, who damn them for working for ‘the man’. They are to corporations what gene therapy promises to be for genetically inherited diseases. They’re recoding business.

We know that corporations can change the world, because they have done it plenty of times before. Don’t think I’m letting governments off the hook here, they have a crucial role to play in passing and enforcing appropriate legislation, but for all their frustrations the corporate sector can move quicker. As one of my clients (one of the world’s largest manufacturers) said

“We understand that the world is Darwinian, even for corporations, and that those that do not adapt to changing realities will struggle. We believe that addressing climate change and matters of social justice isn’t a threat to the company, but an engine for growth. A company that does not take into account a wider world-view will stifle innovation as it fails to attract passionate employees, a company that becomes a market follower rather than leader. We’d rather lead.”

Bring on round two.

In my work I am often preaching the value of a good mistake. Over a thousand years before Rene Descartes came up with his famous philosophical maxim “I think, therefore I am” Saint Augustine said, fallor ergo sum: “I err, therefore I am”. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame nailed it when he said, “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

So, mistakes are to be learnt from.

However, if you’ve made a mistake that has impacted on others, learning from it is not the whole job. It’s important to apologise.

The problem is, how do you apologise to 400 people who are no longer in the same room?

On Saturday I made one of my worst (or best, depending on how you look at it) mistakes. I’d been invited to talk at The Boring Conference after meeting one of its organisers, William Barrett, at a School of Life event – and proceeding to drink too much wine afterwards. I knew nothing of the conference except the proposed line-up had some names on it I recognised from my brief time as a stand-up, notably Robin Ince (who didn’t appear in the end) and Josie Long. William asked me to come and talk about why I found pessimism boring. I asked if I could talk about why I find cynicism boring instead and the subject was agreed. And that was it.

And so it was that I found myself on a plane the night before thinking I’d better finish writing something on the matter. I let my inner polemicist spurge (replete with prodigious swearage) onto the page – always a useful technique for finding out what you might feel about something – but usually something that needs a judicious edit afterwards.

I was returning from giving a keynote speech at a conference that I’d been really nervous about talking at: an address to some $250billions’ worth of the world’s super-rich about how they might need to reboot some of their assumptions – and start to see their worth by acts of creation rather than ownership. This had gone surprisingly well and so the Boring Conference (a short 5-10 minutes) seemed like it would be something I didn’t need to think about too much – and in doing so I did the event and the audience a disservice. Because I’d been so nervous about talking to the super-rich (I’m talking stupidly rich here) I’d researched the event heavily, attended all of it – and re-wrote my talk at least four times while I was there. I was following one of the best pieces of advice I ever received in my brief flirtation with stand-up – namely that a really great speaker says what they want to say, but in the way the audience wants to hear it.

By contrast I turned up at the Boring Conference having done no research into what it was about and assuming it was something like a Friday night comedy slug-out. As such my sweary rant went down about as well as an appearance of Satan at a five year old’s birthday party. Boring is a nuanced, charming and abstracted event about the non-obvious and what we can learn from paying attention to the things that often pass us by. It was about pausing to think. I’d done exactly the opposite of what was required. I’d told the audience what I wanted to say in exactly the way they didn’t want to hear it. I was shouting about something in grand arm-waving, polemical full flow, when the event was about the whispers of experience we need to learn from. My performance was akin to Ian Paisley interrupting an Eva Cassidy song. It was staggeringly wrong in pace, tone and intent.

As I walked off the stage I began to feel the sticky hot embarrassment of a real cock-up trickle down my neck – and it got worse as the evening went on. Having Twitter on in these moments is instructive. I was ‘the guy that everyone hated’ and ‘a terrible human being’ (this from another of the speakers, Greg Stekelman, whose musings on Tube lines were as perfectly judged for this audience as my rant was ill-judged). I think the tweet ‘Brilliant #Boring2011, apart from Mark Stephenson, who is a cunt,” probably summed up it up for a lot of the audience. (This from @mumoss).

I learnt a whole bunch of stuff from that experience – and I learnt it real quick. But learning, as I said, is half the job.

So please accept my apology. Sorry Boring. All 400 of you. As Greg Stekelman tweeted “Rarely has one man misjudged the mood so badly.”