idea.” To some degree, entrepreneurs and inventors have to be overconfident about the odds of their ideas succeeding, or they wouldn’t have the motivational fuel to pursue them.

When our character is praised, we internalize it as part of our identities. Instead of seeing ourselves as engaging in isolated moral acts, we start to develop a more unified self-concept as a moral person.

When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults in our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us the courage to contemplate how we can change them.

When people presented drawbacks or disadvantages, I would become an ally. Instead of selling me, they’ve given me a problem to solve.”

Most people assume it’s better to be a strategic optimist than a defensive pessimist. Yet Norem finds that although defensive pessimists are more anxious and less confident in analytical, verbal, and creative tasks, they perform just as well as strategic optimists. “At first, I asked how these people were able to do so well despite their pessimism,

Bridgewater assesses cultural

When they don’t feel anxious, they become complacent; when encouraged, they become discouraged from planning. If you want to sabotage the performance of chronic defensive pessimists, just make them happy.

But along the way, to earn the status that eventually gave her power, she did have to alter the way she spoke. Her shift in strategy shares something with the most bizarre startup pitch you might ever encounter.

In principle, audiences should be more open to novelty than managers. They don’t have the blinders associated with expertise, and they have little to lose by considering a fresh format and expressing enthusiasm for an unusual idea.