One of my students posed this question as to what is the difference between Hope and Optimism.  This came through while I was discussing positive organizational behaviour and the components (Hope, Efficacy, Resilience, and Optimism) of psychological capital.  I answered him and with few examples helped him understand the difference.  However I thought of further diving in thinking ocean and putting efforts to explore the relationship between these two terms.

It was in Nov 2004 during a round table session of ISQOLS annual conference held at University of Pennsylvania, I met Prof CR Synder.  We were together discussing different dimensions of quality of life in different geographies. I did not know about his contribution on building academic body of the literature on hope apart from other major academic ventures.  After the session we exchanged our business cards and after few weeks at my workplace in Shillong, I received a packet of published papers by him on different aspects of hope.  It drove me to study the concept and understand its practicality in human behaviour.  His book on Positive Psychology expanded my understanding of organizational behaviour and happiness (or human well-being).

CR Synder defined Hope as – the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways. This capability helps one to choose from the available options in order to design actions towards achieving desired goal.  The motivation becomes an agency with which the efforts and actions are attached.  We live in hope, we get hopeful to achieve certain goals, we enjoy achievements and through this process we correlate between efforts and achievement.  Hope helps in building positive attitude towards future keeping us motivated to perform our best.

Optimism is one’s belief that outcomes would be positive. Optimism is looking beyond with an assurance that the future would be better than present.  It is a state that determines how one approaches different aspects of life – work and career, family and friends, spaces and geographies, society and polity. I recall one small interaction with director of schools sometime in the early 90s.  Out of nowhere he just asked – how do you look at today.  My reply was prompt and crisp – sir, today is better than yesterday and tomorrow shall be better than today.  He smiled but I was little puzzled as to did I tell something wrong.  Later after few days, I heard one of my colleagues sharing with me that the director appreciated my approach towards life.  I was relieved and my belief in positive thinking and being optimist about future became further stronger.  Optimism gets nurtured in the company of positive people and it keeps driving one to experiment and explore with an optimistic thinking not really wasting efforts on overthinking about the negative outcomes.

Hope drives desire and expectation whereas optimism is a positive state about future. Though, Nietzsche was of the opinion that – hope is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment, yet it is hope that keep pushing us to stay put with efforts.  A cognitive assessment of the outcome of such efforts help us visualise future.  It is coupled with an expectation between individuals; an individual and event; an individual and his/her efforts. This helps us build positivity in our mindset, efforts and expectations.  Hope is an emotion that influences desire which motivates to perform better in an expectation of positive outcomes.

Being hopeful could be a state depending of the individual characteristics. Similarly being optimistic be a state that influences our thinking believing that there are going to be better days ahead.  Interestingly when we attempt to translate these two terms, hope and optimism, into Hindi we get Aasha (आशा) <drive> for Hope and Aashavaad (आशावाद) <state> for Optimism.  So it further explains that these two terms are same when it comes to the linguistic property of hindi language.  From this perspective such a question is more than obvious from a student grown in Indian settings.

Though there is not much difference between these terms as such yet dialectical enquiry helps us to understand the difference as narrated earlier.  We need to be hopeful for good things to happen in future and that attitude is one of the most important possessions or acquisitions for an individual to lead a good life that is full of energy, enthusiasm and confidence.  Optimists always hope for the best.  It is rather impossible to find a person who is hopeless yet optimist.  I am hopeful that tomorrow would be better than today and I am optimist that there would be sunshine with blue sky tomorrow. I hope that my answer would help the students to understand the relationship between these two terms and I am optimist that there would be many more such questions that would drive me to think.

I really appreciate such questions from students which pushes one to further explore, learn and build perspective.  So readers if you think I can answer some of your questions, please feel free to pose them.