Looking at the future

On this New Year's Day, it's interesting to think about the life insurance commercial where they asked 2,400 people to put magnets of different colors on a big time-line. The magnets were labeled with positive and negative events in our lives (marriage, birth of a child, loss of a loved one, job success, losing a job). The positive events were colored yellow and the negative events were colored blue. After everyone had placed the events on the board, they pulled the camera back to look at the whole board and you could see by the colors that the past was a fairly even mix of blue (negative) and yellow (positive). Actually, it was 60% positive and 40% negative. The future, though, was overwhelmingly yellow or positive (84% positive and 16% negative). It seems like most people think the future will be better. After all, isn't that why we get up every morning and do what we do?

The message of the commercial was that people don't tend to think that bad things might happen to them and they don't plan for the worst. Of course, the life insurance company wants you to use their product to help you plan for the future.

But then you ask yourself if you can really divide events into positive and negative. For instance,  I got what I thought was the dream job only to find myself working for a jerk. What color would that be? And would people really show their true thoughts out on a plaza in front of other people and cameras? I'm not sure. But it is important to realize that even though we are mostly optimistic about the future, it's important to keep an open mind that bad things could happen. As the company says, it's good to be optimistic but it's also good to plan realistically.

Happy New Year to you all. It will be a better year this year. If you don't remember the ad or never saw it, you can find a copy here. I'm not advocating this company or even life insurance. But,

A prudent person foresees danger and takes precautions.
    The simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences. Proverbs 22:3 NLT