Radical Optimism: The Best Way to Navigate the Future.

There are a couple of things that you probably know by now if you have been either following my LinkedIn posts, or reading this newsletter, for a while now.

1) The world is moving fast and I strongly believe it will only go faster.
2) This technological evolution will change everything, and I truly mean everything.
3) I am a radical optimist.

This week I want to take you on a short journey to explain why I think that, especially because of points 1 & 2, point 3 is a great way to live your life.

Let’s start with a definition. What do we mean when we discuss “radical optimism”, I asked GPT-o3 for a definition:

So what is “radical optimism” not? It is not naive positivity, ignoring reality, or blindly believing everything will magically turn out fine. It doesn’t mean refusing to acknowledge problems, struggles, or negativity. Instead, radical optimism embraces challenges realistically and consciously chooses to maintain a hopeful and constructive outlook despite them, focusing on possibilities rather than limitations.

All together, I do have the feeling that this way of living is just healthier for everyone.

Why is it so important at this exact moment in time?

I think it is pretty obvious. There is a lot, a lot of fear out there. Nothing is scarier than change, for a lot of people. We are currently witnessing a technological revolution that nobody has ever witnessed before. Yes, humanity has seen the industrial evolution, the rise of the internet and the take over by social media. But those evolutions took years and years to fully flourish and it gave people, and companies, an enormous amount of time to adapt. Remember how long it took for some brands to open up websites or e-commerce stores? Crazy to think about it now. And that is the big difference with what is happening at the moment. Not only will the change be bigger than when we went from an offline to an online world, it will all happen in the next 5 years or so.

These are the five biggest fears that people feel when discussing the current technological shift. This means we are excluding geo-political disorder, climate change, wars etc:

• Jobs lost to AI, whole industries scrambling to keep up.
• Privacy erased by constant data surveillance.
• Deepfakes and misinformation eroding trust.
• Rogue AGI threatening human existence.
• Tech deepening inequality and the digital divide.

I strongly believe these challenges are real and we are going to have to deal with them, let me make that clear. Now you can decide, and I use that word deliberately, to let these challenges and fears overwhelm and freeze you, or you decide to stay optimistic about it and open your eyes to how this tech can improve your life and the world.

This is one of the reasons why I started this newsletter and now the WhatsApp community. I want to be a force of positivity, by showing everyone how to potentially benefit from all of this change and how to deal with it maybe a little bit better. If I can only help 1 person achieve this, I succeeded.

I feel that this is necessary because the algorithms of our favorite social media platforms are not really helping with spreading a positive message. The opposite is true, I have mentioned it numerous times. Fear, hate and negative news spreads way faster than anything else. People click faster, share faster, like faster and so on. It’s in our human DNA and the algorithms are exploiting it to the max.

One of the reasons why I wanted to discuss radical optimism this week actually came from a conversation with one of the readers of the newsletter (you know who you are 😉). He shared a clip of a robot that, what it looks like, tries to hit a person standing close to it. He wanted to discuss it on an online platform and I said that I wouldn’t. We then discussed a bunch of the above towards why I didn’t want to.

See the clip I talk about here:

This clip very much plays on the “rogue AI taking over all of humanity” fear, something that Hollywood has also shown many times in devastating fashion in movies such as The Terminator and I, Robot.

Someone who won’t pay too much attention to this when scrolling will probably look at this and see a robot going rogue trying to hurt people. Exactlyyyyy what people are afraid of.

Here is my thinking process when I saw this clip going viral:

• My very first question: how do I know this is real? (and not AI generated). I couldn’t find the answer so I already gave it less value.

• What I see is a machine malfunctioning, something that has been happening since the industrial revolution.

• This machine is not “thinking” or making any decisions. It clearly responds to some (wrong) input the person on the right, on the computer, gives it.

• AI at the moment has no “intent”, they just execute. AI has no feelings towards humans whatsoever. (Or have feelings at all).

Instead of seeing danger, radical optimism asks: what can we learn from this?

To go back to what radical optimism means. I am not denying that there will be a big challenge with robots, keeping them safe being the top priority probably. What I do believe is that we will find a way to make it work. A common metaphor used for this, coming from history, is the introduction of cars. We didn’t ban cars because they were dangerous, humanity invented seatbelts. When cars started crashing, we didn’t retreat to horse-drawn carriages. We engineered safety. We created driving laws, airbags, speed limits, crash tests. And eventually? We made cars safer than ever, while keeping the freedom and speed that made them so revolutionary in the first place.

A big next step will be self-driving cars (powered by AI). Now let me ask you, with which of the following two statements would you agree:

1- Self-driving cars should only be allowed to be on the road when the company producing them can guarantee there won’t be any (fatal) accidents because of them.

2- Self-driving cars should be allowed to be on the road when the company producing them can proof that they are safer and better than human drivers, causing LESS (fatal) accidents but not zero.

Fear will say option 1, but I strongly believe option 2 is the only correct way forward.

Back to the clip, back to the algorithms. I have said it many times, the negative, the useless fear that is being created, is not something I want to fuel more. I want to counter that, I want to therefore, deliberately, talk more about the exciting changes all this technology is going to bring us. But, without denying the challenges, as I have mentioned many times in this newsletter as well. Which is why I said I don’t want to talk about this clip as “evidence” that the robots are going to be dangerous for humanity.

The other reason that fueled my idea for this newsletter came from a podcast I was listening to (Dave Smith @ Lex Fridman). The guest gave two examples of how economist Gene Epstein would show why radical optimism is worth it.

“So imagine you were sitting around in 1845, at the height of slavery, and you said, “Hey, in 20 years, slavery is going to be abolished across the West.”

If you told that to someone, they’d say, “Dude, slavery has existed for all of human history. Look around, it’s not going anywhere.” You’d have to be out of your mind to think we were just 20 years away from ending it.

And yet, we were. I mean, it’s one of the greatest things that ever happened in human history. Unfortunately, America had to fight a bloody Civil War to get there, but many other countries didn’t. They just walked away from what had been the status quote forever… and stopped doing it.”

and a second one:

“At the beginning of the Reagan administration, around 1981, the neocons were criticizing his attempts at détente with Russia [meaning: easing Cold War tensions through diplomacy]. They were all over the press saying things like, “He just guaranteed another hundred years of Soviet dominance.”

But imagine if someone had said, “Hey, calm down. In ten years, there won’t even be a Soviet Union.”

People would’ve been like, “Okay, nice idea—but you’re out of your fucking mind.”

And yet, that turned out to be true too.”

Those examples hit me hard, in a positive way. It is so true. We can not foresee what weird things will unfold over the next years. I think we just have to keep trust in humanity that we will figure it out, like we always do. Just like the above examples, people at that time would NEVER EVER think those things would came true, yet they did. I bet there are numerous other examples of that. I mean, who would have thought 20 years ago that Donald Trump would be a two-time president of the US? Indeed, they would have called you crazy. (not saying this is a positive thing, just saying nobody could have foreseen it happening haha).

So if literally anything can happen, I think it is purely a decision for you to have a optimistic or a pessimistic look at it. Therefore, I will always choose optimism and I strongly believe you should as well.

And if all the above is not enough to convince you to live a more positive and optimistic live. What if I told you, you will actually live longer if you do so? 👀 Let me share with you some results of being more positive and optimistic, you will be surprised:

You live longer: Two massive studies (160,000 people) found that the most optimistic participants lived 11–15% longer—and were up to 1.7× more likely to reach age 85–90—than the most pessimistic ones. (sources: here and here)

Your heart is safer: A meta-analysis of over 230,000 adults showed optimists had 35% fewer cardiovascular events and 14% lower all-cause mortality. Pessimists? Higher heart disease risk across the board. (sources: here and here)

Your stress response works for you, not against you: Optimists have lower waking cortisol and recover from stress faster. Pessimists show more intense, prolonged stress curves that slowly wear down the system. (sources: here and here)

Positive emotions build mental resilience: According to researcher Barbara Fredrickson, emotions like joy and hope “broaden and build” our minds—widening focus, boosting creativity, and stockpiling resources for the next challenge. (source: here)

You’re more likely to stick to healthy habits: Optimists are 15% more likely to exercise, eat well, and avoid smoking. Not because they’re morally superior but because they believe effort pays off. (sources: here and here)

Pessimism adds clinical risk: Studies link a pessimistic mindset to faster functional decline and higher risk of fatal heart disease, even when controlling for age, income, and baseline health. (source: here)

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently stated that an “embarrassing” amount of your success in your twenties depends on your attitude and the reason why is simple: Managers would rather work with positive people.

And come on, we can all agree (I think) that positive and optimistic people (not ignorant people tho 😉) are more fun and nicer to be around. It is proven to be contagious as well, same as ambition, discipline, drive and so forth. This is the main reason why your circle, the people closest to you, are so important. Probably the most important decision(s) in your life. I strongly believe that one of the reasons I am, currently, in the best shape of my life has a lot to do with the fact that my best friend is an ex-world class athlete and 2010 World Cup Finalist. It’s contagious, I am telling you!

Do you want to live a more positive life but your friends are nothing but pessimist, cut them loose. Sounds harsh, I know, but it is worth it.

Now, as explained in the beginning, I am not ignorant to the fact that being positive can sometimes be very hard. Especially when you are at a low point in life, I have been there too. When I hit rockbottom I didn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. What helped me back then is that I started meditating daily, I slowly started putting things in perspective and my life slowly but surely started turning around for the better. So I speak from experience when I say that there always will be sunshine after darkness. Now I have personally experienced it twice, I hope I can battle any setback better as I am optimistic that I will get out from it again, and again, and again, if I have to.

Let me end by saying that life is not easy and that everyone has their challenges. We are living in an extremely wild time and we are not slowing down. I just hope that you, together with me, deliberately choose positivity.

Last week I finished reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist.

His core insight: We can’t always control what happens to us. But we can control how we respond to it.

Even in the darkest, most brutal conditions imaginable, he observed that the people who held onto a sense of meaning—some purpose beyond their pain—were the ones most likely to survive.

He wrote:

That’s radical optimism.

Not sugarcoating. Not toxic positivity. Just a deep, powerful belief that your perspective is your power. That your response, especially under pressure, is where your freedom lives.

This is the ultimate reframe. Not just for bad days, but for navigating a future full of change.

So let’s together, as a community, decide that we will be as positive as we can and share all the positivity as much as we can. Person for person, we might even change the world.

❤️ 

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^{Who am I and why you should be here:}

^{Over the years, I’ve navigated industries like advertising, music, sports, and gaming, always chasing what’s next and figuring out how to make it work for brands, businesses, and myself. From strategizing for global companies to experimenting with the latest tech, I’ve been on a constant journey of learning and sharing.}

^{This newsletter is where I’ll bring all of that together—my raw thoughts, ideas, and emotions about AI, blockchain, gaming, Gen Z & Alpha, and life in general. No perfection, just me being as real as it gets.}

^{Every week (or whenever inspiration hits), I’ll share what’s on my mind: whether it’s deep dives into tech, rants about the state of the world, or random experiments that I got myself into. The goal? To keep it valuable, human, and worth your time.}