Written and Narrated and by Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com

If  left to whim, we will mostly be driven by our biases and we have lots  of them. One that most of us have is an optimism bias. Some estimates  are that roughly 70-80% of people have this bias. There is a pessimism  bias as well. While I am convinced that it is much better to be  optimistic than pessimistic, we must be aware of the downside to both  biases.

A pessimism bias is primarily driven by fear and that was  predominant in our early evolution. But gradually, this pessimism bias  was replaced by optimism as our lives improved. This idea of progress is  perhaps best captured by the concept of "one step forward and two steps  back".

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