Professional Optimism Is a Superpower. Most People Practice the Performative Version.

When I started at Amazon, I was on the Kindle team, serving as a junior engineer. It was Amazon’s first hardware product, and nobody on the team had ever shipped hardware and software in parallel before. The launch date kept slipping, and each new date was announced with the same confident energy as the last one.

I’d put in for vacation that summer, well before any of the slips had occurred. When I later confirmed the dates with my manager, the answer was abrupt: “You can’t take vacation that month. That’s when we’re launching!”

We didn’t launch that month. Or the next one. The dates kept moving, and everyone kept saying the next one was real. All those canceled vacations and family plans, because the next launch date was the one.

As a result, morale fell off a cliff.

Nobody wanted to admit that we kept missing our dates because we didn’t know what it would take to hit them.

Some people call this approach hopium — the cheap, weightless optimism that costs nothin…