Virtology GlobalAn initiative of Instituto Virtudes · Brazil
The pessimist thinks they are being realistic, and on average they are more wrong. A real optimist doesn’t deny the risk and doesn’t daydream about the result. They act before they are certain, and that can be trained.
English editorial edition of Isabella Becker’s Portuguese essay, translated and adapted for international readers. The article presents Virtology’s interpretation; its specific theoretical mechanisms should be distinguished from independently established clinical findings.
The pessimist thinks they are being realistic. On average, they are more wrong.
That sentence is uncomfortable because pessimism presents itself as maturity. I’m just being down to earth. Better to expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised. If it goes wrong, at least I was prepared. It looks like prudence. And many people who live this way look at optimists with a polite suspicion, the way you look at someone naive.
But pessimism charges a high price, and it charges in places that don’t show up right away: in the postponed decision, the proposal never made, the project never started, the money that wasn’t invested where it could have grown. And positive thinking, which many people offer as the cure, doesn’t solve it either. Sometimes it makes things worse.
Optimism, as Virtology understands it, is neither of the two.
To understand Optimism, Virtology starts with its opposite. Dr. Eduardo Casarotto’s book defines the pessimistic character in one sentence: it is the anticipation of suffering.
The mechanism is simple. I anticipate the pain so as not to be caught by surprise. If it goes badly, I’m prepared. Am I going to ask for a raise? He won’t give it. Open the business? It won’t work. Send the proposal? They’ll turn it down. The bad forecast works as a cushion. If the worst comes, it was already counted.
The book calls this security bought with paralysis. The person protects themselves from disappointment, and the price of the protection is not trying. Since they don’t try, they receive no data that contradicts the forecast. And the forecast keeps looking true.
Notice a sentence many pessimists say: at least I don’t fool myself. It hides a calculation Virtology knows well. Whoever anticipates failure is never caught being wrong. And never being caught wrong is a way of protecting one’s own importance. The book says it in so many words: pessimism, fear of the future and paralysis by doubt are expressions of pride.
What comes in this section is research from outside Virtology, which the book itself cites.
The neuroscientist Tali Sharot has spent years studying how the brain imagines the future. Her best-known finding is that the healthy brain has an optimism bias: it tends to slightly overestimate the chances of good things. And she showed something else, more interesting for this article. In depression, that bias tends to disappear, and in more severe cases it reverses: the future is imagined as worse than the real odds suggest. Losing the good bias did not make those people wiser. It made the future darker than it is.
The book draws from this research the conclusion that opens this article: the pessimist is not being realistic. They are being less accurate than average, and paying for the inaccuracy with paralysis.
If pessimism blocks, the answer seems obvious: think positive. Imagine the result, visualize the success, picture the win. A large part of self-help culture lives on that idea.
The psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, at New York University, tested it for more than twenty years. This section is also research from outside Virtology. In one study, she followed women in a weight-loss program. Those who most fantasized about a beautiful result lost less weight than those who imagined the path with its difficulties. In another, students who fantasized a lot about their dream job received, two years later, fewer job offers and lower salaries. In a third, she measured blood pressure during positive fantasy and saw the body’s energy drop, as if it had already arrived.
Oettingen’s explanation is that positive fantasy hands the brain a preview of the reward. The brain relaxes as if the goal were already met. And whoever relaxes too early doesn’t move.
It is worth stating the size of what this research shows. It is about fantasy, not about hope. Imagining a good outcome does no harm in itself. What gets in the way is staying in the image, without looking at the obstacle and without acting. That is exactly where Virtology separates Optimism from positive thinking.
The book defines Optimism with three words: positivity, contentment and courage. All three need explaining, because none of them means what common sense assumes.
Positivity is not seeing everything as lovely. Every situation has several angles, and positivity is choosing to look at the good angle too, without pretending the bad one doesn’t exist. The book says that being negative or positive in the face of things is a choice.
Contentment is not resignation. It is stopping complaining. Many people complain about everything and do nothing to change it, and the book calls constant complaining an infantile psychic position. Being content is not accepting anything at all. It is leaving complaint behind so you can act.
Courage is the most interesting point. Courage is not one of the thirty-three virtues. It lives inside Optimism, together with the State of Certainty and Perseverance. The book is direct: is the person fearful? Give them State of Certainty, Perseverance and Optimism, and they become a lion.
The book separates Optimism from positive thinking in one sentence:
Optimism doesn’t deny the risk. It builds the good scenario with the same sharpness with which the pessimist builds the bad one. And then it acts toward it. Without action, Optimism is incomplete. The book calls that incomplete form passive optimism, optimism of thought without action. It is positive thinking under another name.
The book gives a simple test for whether Optimism has taken hold:
Think about the last bad news you received about money. An unexpected bill, a client who canceled, an investment that fell. What came to mind first? If it was the disaster scenario, Optimism is not yet in place. If it was the question what can I do now, it is.
The marker doesn’t ask you not to feel fear. It asks that fear not be the first thing to decide.
The book describes Optimism as a reorganization of three brain networks, and it is worth seeing simply what each one does.
The Default Mode Network is the network that imagines, tells the story of who you are, and simulates the future. In chronic pessimism, it almost always simulates bad scenarios. Each bad simulation strengthens the circuit, and the strengthened circuit produces more bad simulations. With Optimism, it learns to simulate both sides: what could go wrong and what could go right.
The Salience Network decides what deserves attention. In the pessimist, it is trained to catch signs of risk and let signs of opportunity slip by. The book describes possibilities that are objectively there but stay invisible. With Optimism, attention is redistributed. People who go through this change tend to describe it the same way: I started seeing opportunities where before I only saw problems.
The Central Executive Network plans and carries out. This is where the book places Perseverance as part of Optimism: the capacity to sustain action despite uncertainty.
Underneath these networks are two pieces that explain why pessimism is so tiring. The amygdala, the alarm, fires at every thought about an uncertain future. That is why thinking about the future brings tightness to the chest, and people start avoiding it. And the ventral striatum, the center of reward anticipation, stops responding to distant rewards. Dopamine goes entirely to immediate pleasure: the purchase, the food, social media. Long projects run out of fuel. The book calls this an inability to sustain long projects, and says it reverses with practice.
In Virtology, Optimism is a virtue of Development, not of the foundation. It sits in the middle of the Pyramid of Virtues, which is the order in which virtues are built.
The book is very clear about what happens when someone tries to train Optimism too early. It names three failures:
Attempting Optimism without this foundation, the book says, almost always produces a sick version of the virtue: performed optimism, blind optimism or defensive optimism. That is why the combination Virtology defines for development, practice and life transitions brings Optimism in company:
Optimism without the State of Certainty first doesn’t hold. It is the order, not enthusiasm, that makes the virtue last.
Why is this article in a series about prosperity? Because pessimism is one of the most expensive forms of scarcity.
Think about what a postponed decision costs. The course you didn’t take three years ago. The price you didn’t raise. The salary conversation left for later. The business still on paper. The book describes chronic pessimism exactly like this: a collection of important decisions postponed for years, each with its justification, and the combined cost of all of them.
And there is the other side. Blind optimism costs too. The investment made without looking at the risk, the debt taken on because next month will be better, the business opened without a plan. In Virtology, this is not too much Optimism. It is Optimism without Acceptance and without Humility.
Mature Optimism stands in the middle. It looks at the risk, does the math, and decides. Then it perseveres. And repeats.
In a series about prosperity, this needs to be said clearly, because the word optimism is often glued to the idea of attraction. Vibrating, manifesting, asking the universe and waiting for the money to arrive.
Virtology explicitly parts ways with that reading. In the chapter on prosperity, the book says that wishing, hoping and vibrating for money to come does not produce prosperity, because desire alone attracts nothing. What prospers is responsibility in action. Its concrete form has a simple name: work.
The book calls Optimism the key virtue of the Law of Vibration, one of the twenty-two Laws of Life. And it explains what that law means: a person’s background emotional state works as a base tone, and fear and anger hold the person to the most primitive reactions. Read without naivety, the book says, this law does not reward desire. It rewards state and action in alignment. Not what you hope for, but what you do from a coherent stance.
Another law helps to see Optimism at work, the Law of the Observer. Whoever watches for threats finds threats. The pessimist looks at the future searching for the risk. The optimist looks searching for the path. Each one finds what they are looking for, not by magic, but because attention decides what enters the field of vision.
The book describes three exercises for this virtue and adds a fourth, for Perseverance. All are simple to understand.
The first is reframing the complaint. Making a list of the day’s complaints and, for each one, writing a balanced positive sentence. Not a false sentence. A sentence that is also true. The client canceled is still true. And now I have time to look for two new ones is true as well.
The second is coping meditation. A few minutes a day imagining a difficult situation and yourself getting through it well. Notice the difference from the fantasy Oettingen studied: it isn’t imagining the arrival, it is imagining the path, with the obstacle inside it.
The third is focusing on opportunities. In the face of an obstacle, deliberately looking for the possibility it also brings.
The fourth, for Perseverance, is the postponed decision. Identifying a decision you have been pushing off and making it within a short deadline. The book insists on starting small. A small decision made in a week teaches the brain more than a big one planned for years.
The book is also honest about time: weeks for the first gestures, months for the network to reorganize the pattern, one to three years for the virtue to become second nature.
The postponed decision. Seven days to show your brain that it is possible to act before being certain.
This article is part of a series on prosperity. The first, Prosperity is not a money problem, sets out the seven virtues I use in my prosperity training, in the order of the Pyramid. Optimism is the last of them, and now it is clear why.
The full training is in my course Architecture of the Possible — The Neuroscience of Abundance, my brain-training method for prosperity. It launches in November, in Portuguese; the English version of the course comes later, and the book is out in English at launch.
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If pessimism comes together with a sadness that doesn’t lift, loss of interest in things, or changes in sleep or appetite, it may be depression, and depression calls for professional support. Understanding the mechanism helps, and it does not replace care. If you are in crisis, contact a local emergency or crisis service.
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Write to Isabella Becker · EMEA →Write to Ana Karolina Cejudo · Americas →Want the whole framework, for yourself or to help others as a professional? Start with the short course, or take the full training with Dr. Eduardo Casarotto.
The Institute’s Professional Formation with Dr. Eduardo Casarotto is the complete training: the entire framework, the clinical method and the certification to practice.
Explore the Professional Formation →Translated and edited from the Portuguese essay.