Productive people are optimist in part because they have a realistic assessment of where the world is right now. productive people realize there was no such thing as the good old day, there's never been a better time to be a human being especially a productive human being than right now. Now it's common for people to look back at their childhood or some earlier part of their life is the good old days, I can look back at the 70s and say those were the good old days I was young carefree, I had a perfect head of hair. It was wonderful. Here's the reality back then. I had to watch only three channels on TV.

I didn't get to pick what was on. Some network executive got to pick I had an option of looking at one local newspaper. There were these things called eight track tapes, which are very difficult to listen to and you can only listen to one or four things on at a time, I had to drive to a library. Life was awful compared if I wanted to talk to someone I had to stand in the kitchen and use a family phone or get a string and attach two cans to talk to a friend in the backyard. no cell phones. No iPods.

The average person who went back to the 1970s service they would hate it would say this is horrible. How did people live like this? And yeah, I was one of the lucky ones I grew up. Not fabulously wealthy, but the middle upper middle class in the United States in the 1970s. There is no such thing as the good old days for most of human history until the enlightenment. Just a couple hundred years ago, 202 50 years ago, life was grim 90% of the world live in abject poverty.

People died at age 30. Every single year since then, or at least every decade since then, for the most part, there's been massive human progress. productive people at some level. Notice they bind to this they see the general trajectory of the world getting better and they want to be a part of it. They don't let the negative headlines scare them out of it. Oh, unemployment bad.

This stock crashes. Here's a flood. If you just look at the news, you think, Oh my gosh, the world is getting worse. The world's getting more violent now. The world has never been less violent than it is today. Are all problems gone?

Are there? No refugee problems? No, that's not the case. Yeah, there are refugee problems. There is a problem with poverty, but today, it is proportionately something so much less than it has ever been in human History and productive people focus on this goodness doesn't mean they stick their head in the sand and ignore bad news and discrimination and problems and environmental concern. We don't ignore it.

But when you look at the big picture, the arc of history there's been tremendous progress every single generation since the enlightenment. And when you know that you realize that that fills you with optimism that fills you with a sense of possibility. And that in of itself is motivating to accomplish more unproductive people sit around watch local news, national news, all they ever hear is how everything is going to a bad place in a handbasket. Everything is worse. Everything is awful. more deaths, more misery and it's fundamentally Not true.

That's one of the big differences between productive people. And the rest productive people can push away the headlines of the day, the flotsam and jetsam of the trivial news and looked at the big picture of what's going on the big picture. It's not perfect. We have global warming, but the big picture shows humanity getting progressively better worldwide. Every generation doesn't mean that every single country it's it's perfect step up every single year. But in the big picture, humanity is getting better.

Life on Earth is getting better for people. And that's what fuels a productive person's mindset.