I'm an uncurable optimist, believing in good and expecting to make a difference. People can debate endlessly if it's better to be a pessimist and not be disappointed or to be an optimist and have a happy perspective on things. For me, I'd say that optimism is the better approach -- it can even be fueled by pessimism, as I learned today.
At work, many of us write short daily reports of our accomplishments and decisions. Two of my coworkers obviously dealt with the same problem, but in different ways:
First, R. sent his daily:
Regarding the memory leak in GNU awk: Since I as an "old naysayer" don't suppose that it can be fixed anyway, I configured some resource capping.
S. later wrote in his report:
I'm gonna show that "old naysayer" R. I fixed the memory leak in gawk and sent it to the GNU developers. I'd have done that anyway, but now more than ever. :P
Getting things done also is an attitude.