No sense being pessimistic. Wouldn't work anyway.

Live according to the ethics of excellence, and you can always stand proud. Pride - not vanity, but dignity and self-respect - should carry a lot of weight in helping you make decisions. Let pride help you decide.

Everybody makes honest mistakes, but there's no such thing as an honest cover-up.

Optimism is a much more enabling mindset than hard-core realism, and it's far superior to pessimism...[because] Hope helps move us in the direction of our goals and ambitions.

Who is this vague "they" we blame for so many of our problems? "They" is the obscure party we use as our whipping boy to camouflage the fact that we - you and I and other specific human beings just like us - have to start doing things differently. "They" can't fix anything. We can.

Some people argue against both optimism and pessimism in favor of so-called realistic thinking. They distrust optimism on the grounds that it causes us to sugercoat problems, discount risks, and exaggerate the upside. Pessimism, on the other hand, is criticized as too downbeat, de-energizing, and generally damaging in its impact. This crown prefers realism as the neutral and objective middle ground.

Pay attention to the voice within. . . . Sometimes the voice of your conscience gets drowned out by crowd noise or by the pep rally of temptations. And your mind may put some selfish spin on the ball, rationalizing that it's okay to veer away from the ethical route. When we run into conflicts between ethical "shoulds" and our selfish "wants," we all argure out ways to con our conscience. But take pains to listen, because it has your best interests at heart.