What If We Subtracted: The Rush To Fix

“You said you were good with it…” Before I finished this sentence to my husband, I felt — even saw — the wave coming. The confusion, which almost immediately becomes frustration, then anger. The exact sequence our therapist has been helping us recognize and avoid.

It had been a long day (a long week), and I didn’t have the capacity to head off the escalation. Maybe thanks to recognizing the pattern, maybe from sheer fatigue, we didn’t go as deep as we often do. We didn’t do the usual few days of icy distance, me stewing in my own negativity about our inability to fix this. I went to bed a bit deflated, but not totally flattened. And woke up and made him a coffee — resentment-free.

I recognize that as optimism. With some outside, expert guidance, we’d already seen a better way, and knew we were capable of it, even on our own. I didn’t have the capacity in the moment to do the harder, newer thing… but I knew it was possible. Someone had showed us a better way, and we’d already done it a bit better, a few times.

Earlier that week, I’d finally gotten on the phone with my book agent, hoping to get unstuck after nearly two months sitting on her feedback on my chapter summaries — feedback I owed a revised draft in response to, soon, before we could take the proposal to publishers. Between summer travel, a TEDx talk to write, and a few failed attempts to face the revisions, I was stuck, and not very optimistic about the proposal’s direction or momentum.

We spoke. She reassured me she hears this all the time, gave me a clear structure for each chapter summary, and sketched a rough (tentative) timeline for what was left.

I still didn’t have the capacity that week to open the file. But when I did, I dove in headfirst and spent an entire week reshaping the chapter summaries and the book’s overall arc. Again: some outside perspective gave me a vision for a better future, one I could work toward once the capacity showed up.

In both cases, I wasn’t quite ready to realize the vision. That’s not the same as not seeing or believing in it. I didn’t fool myself — or anyone around me — about what was actually going on. I just couldn’t (yet) make it happen.

These two episodes are basically Optimism Month in miniature. Here’s what I’ve taken from a full month of subtracting around optimism, including four fabulous Subtraction Sessions with Meghan French Dunbar, Neal Schore, Nicholas Whitaker, and Caroline Stokes.

Optimism isn’t a distortion of the present reality. It’s a stance toward the future. Same ounces of water in the glass, whether you call it half full or half empty. Calling it half full isn’t lying about the contents; it’s choosing which truth to start from.

This is where the etymology trap lives, too: we subtracted optimus (best, singular, final) at the top of the month, because agreeing on one “best” in a life this plural is a fool’s errand. The modern, useful version is simpler: expecting a positive outcome.

Covering the eye that’s drawn to chaos and negativity isn’t the same as gouging it out. It’s a temporary measure, so the other eye can do its job of seeing possible positive outcomes. This isn’t toxic positivity, which doesn’t survive contact with facts. Real optimism gets tested by bad news and either holds or updates to a stronger version of itself — that’s the antifragility of it.

Here’s the part I underestimated going into this month: almost nobody finds that better-future eye alone. Caroline Stokes told me about a 26-year-old she met in a Waitrose line in London. He was actively concerned about the polycrisis, AI, climate, and more, to the point that it came up when a total stranger asked him politely, “How’s it going?”

Exhibit A: unless you know where to go, hope is genuinely hard to find. One person, asking one good question, pointing at one clear thing, can be the entire difference. That’s not a nice-to-have. It’s what our therapist and my agent provided me with this month, and often the only way the good eye can stay open.

Zack Kass’s “optimism is not naive, it’s a moral obligation” started us off clear that nobody builds toward a future they can’t picture. But the conversations I had with four other brilliant thinkers, to say nothing of my own experiments, demonstrated that the obligation is not to rush to action. We must accept the guidance needed to see a better future, but it is reasonable to give ourselves grace in when and how we have the capacity to work toward it. We get points for effort in this case of optimism.

The month’s four Sessions all arrived at some version of this:

• Neal Schore: the 25th hour is a dividend of subtraction, not a scheduling trick. You don’t lack time, you give it away, and reclaiming it starts with seeing that you have the agency to do so before you’ve actually reclaimed a minute of it.

• Meghan French Dunbar: the game is rigged, but rigged things can be unrigged. Believing that doesn’t require having already unrigged anything, or even believing in your ability to unrig the whole game, single-handedly.

• Nick Whitaker: CHEAT — Capacity, Habits, Energy, Attention, Time. As I told him mid-conversation: “One of my basic premises — it’s not mine, it’s a fact — we can only improve things when there’s available capacity.” Vision without capacity isn’t a failed attempt at optimism, it’s a reasonable order of operations to get there.

• Caroline Stokes: you often need someone else to hand you the vision before you can hold it yourself, whether it’s a coach, partner (in life or business), agent, or just a stranger in a grocery line.

Seeing the better future first, before you can act on it, isn’t naivety and it isn’t stalling. It’s the actual first step. Skipping it doesn’t get you there faster — it just means you’re building blind.

For now, over to you:

“What’s a better future you can already see clearly — and are you letting yourself just see it, without pressure to act on it yet?”

August is Greatest Hits: I’m resting, and putting focus where it belongs — TEDx preparation. I’ll step onto the red dot on August 27 in San Diego — if you or a friend will be there, let me know and I’ll gladly share my discount code! One of this month’s optimism conversations may resurface if it’s as good as I think it is, and/or deeper archive cuts are coming — love, competition, or money month, take your pick.

Maybe there’s a task you can subtract this month in honor of summer?

Paying Subtractors get the rest of this one: what happened before I’d learned this lesson about optimism the hard way — plus the ME/WE/WORLD breakdown of where the rush to fix shows up (including the AI-vs-climate blind spot Caroline named), and the hundred-year-old creativity model that reframes “nothing is happening” as exactly the point.