Positive thinking is wonderful. Many are the paeans sung to it. It promotes health and upward mobility. It’s self-fulfilling — or so positive thinkers think; they wouldn’t be positive thinkers otherwise. If you think you’ll succeed, you’re likely to.
Negative thinking, too, can be self-fulfilling. To launch an enterprise in the uneasy spirit suggested by a U.S. Bureau of Labor finding that 70% of start-up businesses fail within a decade is to court failure within a decade, if not sooner.
Last month, President magazine touched on this theme in its feature on sleep, which this column discussed on Aug. 7. Yasuma Kuroki, a retired Japan Airlines crew member, looks back on 20,000 hours in the air over 30 years. He’s been round the world some 860 times. There’s not much he wouldn’t know about jet lag and other sleep-related problems associated with air travel. His solution? Positive thinking.