I think that is a good way to describe me. Not a complete description, I, like many others, am a bit more complex than that. But our brain loves these simplifications and I think they can be a helpful mirror to help us better understand our selves.

~10 year ago.

Here we are 60-100ft up this cliff next to this waterfall. What if our rope isn't long enough? We'd better tie a not on the end. Better to deal with being stuck on the end than not in that case. What if the anchor fails? We'd better back it up to multiple backups. What if the shock load of the first anchor failing causes the the rest to also fail? We'd better keep the slack off between them consistent and minimal to prevent a catastrophic chain reaction. And this goes on and on. This chain of thoughts started hours ago that morning as I woke up and packed the needed gear and they sure didn't stop after we finally made it down the waterfall alive. That is how my brain has always worked. "Do dumb things safely", I would say. Always thinking of everything that could possible go wrong and how wrong it could all go. Yet, why did I still repel off that waterfall?

How do I live in a world where my eyes and mind always see all the bad, the pain, the risks? Because I hope for a better world. Because I want to live in a world where everything doesn't always go wrong, but sometimes go right. And I want to be that influence for things going right. For others and for me.

I am a positive pessimist. That means if I tell you a dozen things that might go wrong with your idea it isn't because I don't believe in you. It is because I do. If I did not believe in you I wouldn't perceive the risk in you not doing your idea. This means that I often get analysis paralysis. But what if by me choosing to write this code in this way causes a developer in 10 years to do something wrong? But if I do it this other way it could cause this other issue in a year, etc etc. When I get here please help me refocus. My biggest risk and the the one I'm the worst at mitigating is me doing nothing but think. This also means that hard times aren't so hard. I have already thought of this situation. I have already thought of a dozen others that are much much worse. When people ask how I am I often say, "I'm alive". I'm not trying to be dramatic, ok maybe a little, but really that is just how a view things. If the base success metric is survival than anything above that is quite good. Is this the best way way to view the world? Well "best" is the construct our simple minds wanting things to be simple. There is no "best" but there are plenty of different ways and each work and benefit in their own ways. This way has generally worked for me, though not always.

On the gradient quadrant of positivity to negativity and pessimism to optimism, where do you lay?