Make Your Resolutions The Right Way
By: Thomas P Seager
Tags: New Year Resolution, Self Improvement, Self Regulation, Peter Thiel, Positive Thinking

Attitudes of Accomplishment

Peter Thiel is a successful, albeit controversial, entrepreneur and author. After Thiel taught a class in entrepreneurship at Stanford, one of his former students, Blake Masters, turned Thiel’s lecture notes into a book called Zero to One (2014).

Most of the reviews and summaries of the book online focus on what Thiel is most famous for: making money.

What readers and reviewers often fail to appreciate is that a successful entrepreneurial venture is predicated on a particular view of the future that is both optimistic and self-determined by the Founders. This realization is so fundamental that none of the rest of the insights or advice in the book make any sense without it.

To illustrate the point, Master’s and Thiel include a quadrant chart that provides examples of different cultures of optimism and determinism, which I’ve redrawn and expanded upon here.

Cultural attitudes towards the future can be characterized by different degrees of optimism and sense of efficacy. For example, indefinite cultures expect that individuals have little influence over their own futures, whereas definite cultures believe that their futures will be largely due their own efforts.

Most people who make resolutions are already optimistic, so the horizontal access requires little additional explanation. For the purposes of our discussion of New year’s resolutions, the most important dimension is the vertical, which Masters and Thiel call “indefinite/definite.”

The indefinite/definite dichotomy suggests attitudes about the level of confidence in a vision of the future. For example, a definite attitude about the future suggests that the future is knowable and perhaps pre-destined, whereas indefinite suggests that the future is unknowable and uncertain.

But that’s not what we’re focusing on here.

We’re less interested in attitudes about certainty, and more interested in attitudes about how that future is shaped. I’ve relabeled the vertical dimension “Sense of Self-Efficacy” to emphasize the role of individual effort in the future. Those who believe in a indefinite future have a low sense of self-efficacy, because they don’t think their individual efforts will be effective. They lack a sense of control that could orient their future through their own efforts. By contrast, those with a definite view believe that their own efforts will create the future they want to live in.

Europe

Thiel was born in Germany in 1967 and moved to the United States at the age of 11, so he has some experience that informs cultural comparisons. In Thiel’s view, western European attitudes about the future are pessimistic (it’s all going to Hell, eventually) and indefinite (and there’s nothing you can do about it). It’s a sensible attitude for people that endured two World Wars and emerged from the second as pawns caught in a super power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. And it would explain the European attitudes towards long vacations, early retirement, socialism, bureaucracy, recreational sex, and lack of innovation.

China

On the other hand, Thiel characterizes Chinese attitudes as equally pessimistic, but differentiates them as definite. This combination might seem odd, because how can someone both believe that they have the power to shape their own future, and (at the same time) believe that this future is going to be bad? Why not apply their sense of self-efficacy to create a future that is better than their pessimism suggests?

The answer is scale.

At a social scale, the Chinese attitude is that the world is a just house of cards, waiting to collapse upon itself. However, at the individual scale, it might be possible to make the best of it for yourself and your family. With this attitude, it makes sense for wealthy Chinese to overpay for Vancouver real estate because, whatever it costs, it’s better than letting your wealth evaporate in the next change in political leadership or social revolution. It’s a sensible attitude for people with little historical experience of private wealth accumulation, who lack personal or technological privacy, and who face the prospect of wealth confiscation or political prosecution.

Evolution of the Attitude in the United States

The United States is even more interesting. Thiel suggests that the United States in the 1950’s and 19060’s was characterized by definite optimism. In this view, the future will be great, as a consequence of individual effort. It’s a sensible attitude for the Greatest Generation, who defeated fascism, landed a man on the moon, and thought it was on its way to eradicating poverty.

But cracks in that attitude emerged in the 1970’s. First, the Vietnam War sucked resources out of the economy that ensured President Johnson’s War on Poverty would be lost before it ever really got waged. Then, the Watergate scandal (1972–1974) forced President Nixon’s resignation and shook public confidence in the collective institutions credited with winning all these wars in the first place. The nuclear accident at Three Mile Island (1979), stagflation, and the Iran Hostage Crisis (1980) further eroded American attitudes about future prospects.

By the time President Reagan completed his first term in 1984, the change in American attitude was complete. Partly because of Reagan’s positive, optimistic disposition (compared with President Carter’s pragmatic, problem-oriented disposition), US optimism remained intact, but the sense of self-efficacy that characterized the Cold War Era was replaced by an indefinite attitude that failed to see a connection between effort and outcome. The expectation became that things would get better all by themselves, even if we didn’t know how.