[roenxi]

I can give the cynical answer to that. Being correct is a lousy strategy for social creatures, and making the best decision within the limits of what a person knows is a nearly guaranteed way to lose out to someone who takes risks. In that context, realists are not encouraged by the broader society. Better to be surrounded by and encouraging of irrepressible optimists, they explore more and are more likely to try to change the world for the better because they don't understand the essential futility of it all.

Realists live humble, modest lives. Seek to change themselves themselves and such. Accept the futility of it all. Realistically the difference between comfortable and opulent is not as large as it is made out to be. The optimal strategy is to use an approach that is excessively risk tolerant and then hope that you are in the group of people that are lucky. Almost all the people who are 'winning at life' are using some variant of that, or descendants from someone who was.

[javajosh]

Your risk-taking realist needs at least one more quality -- a high pain tolerance. There are two pains you need to deal with, the pain of fearing failure, and the pain of failure itself.

Failure, as in "that machine is halted, and it's not going to move ever again" kind of failure. (Of course, I guess you can always clear out some entropy and start feeding it input again..)

[ksec]

That to me is optimist are taking the VC route and growing at all cost. Realist are tacking the DHH route and simply just grow.

I dont see how Realist cant succeed. There are lots of Realist winning in life we just dont hear about it. There is also the assumption of realist dont take risk.

I just dont think optimist are the recipes for succeed, but neither are realist destined for failure.