Hard Optimism: How to Succeed in a World Where Positive Wins

Price Pritchett does an excellent job in describing how to be an optimist in a realistic way. He presents ideas in new ways. It is motivating and helped me develop new, good habits. It's and easy read and small enough that you can take it with you, anywhere. Highly recommended.

Anyone familiar with "Learned Optimism" from Martin Seligman will find nothing new in this book. What makes it worth reading is the author has done a great job of distilling the essence of Seligman's research and putting it into short, straight-forward chapters. Combined with this condensed approach, the shifting fonts, layouts and pictures keeps the eye engaged and turning pages. After reading it, I bought it for my young adult son to read. I hope he takes it to heart.

I was introduced to this fine short book at a business seminar. I read it only because I respected the opinions of the people conducting the sessions I was attending. Recently re-read it and bought copies for my employees to read. We used it as the primary topic of discussion at a recent office meeting and have been talking about it ever since! What a great thing for our office culture to be able to recognize pessimistic thinking when it arises. The book is too short for anyone to kick about having time to read it, and too good for anyone to have anything but positive comments about. The best part for me was being able to identify the "realist" as a pessimist in disguise.

This book is easy reading, and when you are discouraged or worse, you don't need hard hitting heavy reading, you need something that goes down easy and reminds you of the tools to the brighter side of life. One point that really sticks out for me is the clearly identified four C's of negative thinking, how to identify them and what to do about them. A second point is that we have a natural tendancy toward negative thoughts, and only seem to recognize about 30% of them as being negative. Great book, I expect to see it on the New York Times best seller list soon, and I'll be helping out by giving copies to my friends & family.

Price Pritchett has written more than anyone about organizational change and exactly how some people learn to cope with and even thrive on change. Hard Optimism is not about putting on rose-colored glasses. It's all about facing reality and not letting negative thoughts hinder peoples'natural inclinations and abilities to succeed. For three decades Pritchett has facilitated mergers, acquisitions, and other organizational changes. He is an astute observer of how some people snatch success out of the jaws of defeat and some do exactly the opposite. Hard Optimism shares his wisdom and practical advice. And, like all the other Pritchett books, his writing is powerful, compeling, and entertaining. As an organizational psychologist who has assessed/coached over 6,000 executives, I'd recommend Hard Optimism to any manager or company facing significant change -- and those two categories pretty much include everyone in the business world!