This is a preview of episode notes for a future episode and hasn’t been fully edited.
A positive mental attitude believes that you can achieve your goals no matter what is happening around you, just based on your belief in achieving them and not listening to any sort of negativity or talk of bad circumstances from others. It believes in your strength alone.
A revolutionary mental attitude believes you can achieve your goals and help others achieve theirs by believing that changing the circumstances happening around you is possible. It acknowledges that just being positive is necessary, but not sufficient. It is practiced by controlling your emotions, knowing you are strong enough to stand up against oppression, and taking action while organizing with others.
Yes, you should be positive and work on yourself. It is a major failure of activists to say that this is pointless and to stay negative while waiting for the perfect form of policy and systems change to occur.
But you should also acknowledge reality. Yes, there is an entire system designed to keep you down. But you are able to change that. You must believe you can cause change. Believing that it’s possible makes it easier to achieve. It’s reality but you can change reality. Look at the problem and see how you can improve the situation. Whatever it is, it’s good enough for you to make stoke from it. (A key lesson from skating.)
Another skate lesson: You must know how to fall and train yourself for it because if you don’t, falling will be way harder and more detrimental to you. Lying to yourself about how these problems people are facing aren’t real, that anyone can just pick themselves up by their bootstraps and always succeed doesn’t make you positive or successful; it makes you a jerk and leaves you stuck in failure when things go wrong because your mind can’t understand it. Understand and accept systemic problems and put your effort toward both working on yourself and working to create a system that promotes anti-fragility, ergo, being able to fall and get back up.