Optimism can help you to be happier, healthier and more successful. Pessimism leads, by contrast, to hopelessness, sickness and failure, and is linked to depression, loneliness and painful shyness, ff we could teach people to think more positively, it would be like inoculating them against these mental ills. The belief that you can succeed affects whether or not you will. Optimists and pessimists deal with the same challenges in very different ways. When things go wrong, the optimist looks for loopholes. But the pessimist tends to blame himself. Positive or negative, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people feel hopeless they don’t bother to acquire the skills they need to succeed. Optimism, however, diverts our attention away from negativism and channels it into positive, constructive thinking. When you’re an optimist, you’re more concerned with problem-solving than with useless carping about issues. It takes a dreamer -someone with hopelessly optimistic ideas, great persistence, and unlimited confidence -to tackle a problem that is big.