Change You Can Believe In | Outside the Box

Has Optimism Hurt Obama?

By Dax-Devlon Ross

“When the going gets tough,” neuroscientist Tali Sharot writes in her 2011 book The Optimism Bias, “we desperately start searching for the silver lining.” Sharot believes that optimism bias — “the inclination to overestimate the likelihood of encountering positive events in the future and to underestimate the likelihood of experiencing negative events” — leads us to miscalculate our decisions. These miscalculations in turn cause us to regret our decisions. After reading Sharot’s book I thought about President Obama. Had he been hurt by the optimism we felt when he took office three years ago?

The Story

Outside the Box Publishing was created by Derek Beres and Dax-Devlon Ross in 2005 as the latest in a decade-long literary collaboration between two friends who have experienced enough together to consider themselves family. It is an important and valuable way for us – perhaps more than anyone else – to continue believing in the written word. It seems only fitting in a cyberworld so accessible, so democratic in its way, that companies like ours are a natural outgrowth. Publishing books nowadays isn’t that difficult. So many alternative avenues have opened that anyone can write and publish efficiently. The difficult part is finding people that believe in and support your work. That makes a big difference in whether we move ahead or stand still. If we don’t have someone, that one person besides us, how can we expect the best of ourselves? In many ways, our commitment to literature is an extension of our commitment to fellowship. We have been fortunate enough to have one another to keep us creatively and philosophically alive, despite the setbacks and detours and plain old realities of modern existence. Outside the Box Publishing is our way of opening up the conversation and allowing other serious writers into the fold.

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