Greenock Telegraph 8th October 2021

Are you a glass half empty or a glass half full person? Whichever you are, two things are true. The content of the glass remains the same but your attitude towards it differs. Therefore, as in so many situations in life, it’s the attitude that matters. Half empty will be negative, lamenting the lack of a full glass and half full will be happy that they still have half a glass. That perplexes me, am I saying that a positive attitude means people are content with less? Do we need the constantly unhappy, negative, moaning, whinging pessimists of life to hold failure up to scrutiny? Those people that are constantly criticising, never seeing the good in anything or anyone? Of course not. Negativity doesn’t create solutions, it creates obstacles to progress. To progress we need to believe that we are capable of achieving and we need to rise to challenges. The glass half empty category inevitably sees the difficulty as someone else’s problem and by definition only ever sees the downside. When Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb, it didn’t happen overnight. He famously said “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” These days he would be descended on by social media self- appointed experts telling him to give up. When we consider the times, we live in and the challenges we face, the ability to endure through adversity will be a key factor. We will emerge from Covid, we will establish a clean green renewable energy industry, a wellbeing economy and achieve net zero carbon. The alternative is to condemn ourselves to failure by default.