How malicious positivity protects your mindset.
Like schadenfreude, but for your lifelong happiness
This month at Nice Work, we’re talking about mindset. How to not see everyone as competition. How to foster creativity. How to be brave (and how to be courageous and confident, too).
Our goal: To help you show up with less fear. While temporarily motivational, fear isn’t great for our productivity or our personal stability. Fear permeates the walls (and the emails). It is best kept to small doses, so it can be balanced out by much larger servings of open-mindedness, creativity, and confidence.
There’s another obstacle to having a more open mindset - but be warned, it is a big “meta.”
It is whether you can trust, and then take, another path besides the one in front of you.
More concretely: To go after a blue ocean business opportunity, you have to spot it in the first place. Which is harder if no one else is swimming that way.
This mental “lock-in” is found in ultra-competitive workplaces, in the throes of a creative block, and even in the deliberations to speak up. Once we start, it becomes harder and harder to stop. That can look like defeatist thinking, such as: There’s no way through except by competing. There’s no way out of this creative block except to force it. There’s no good reason to speak up.
Spotting a blue ocean, or adopting another mindset, is not easy. It is more like a muscle that has to be trained. Which brings us to today’s topic: Malicious positivity. Or: How to start looking for blue oceans in your everyday life.
In April, we explored a similar mindset topic of choosing chaos over malice. To summarise, it’s about what we choose to think of other people’s actions. It’s when we hear hoofbeats, training ourselves to think “that’s a group of loud, unorganised horses,” instead of “that’s a well-organised hit squad of zebras on their way to my precise location.”
And it is indeed, training.
One of my favourite writers, David Foster Wallace, beautifully covers the hard work this requires in his famed 2005 commencement speech. He begins with a joke:
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
He goes on to share that the true power of education is in what to think about - and what to pay attention to. Using the example of going to the grocery store, he encourages us that:
“It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.”
Yes, it is hard work to lend that much goodwill to the world. Especially if there’s all of the data available that says they don’t deserve it. So…how do you convince yourself to do it?
By rewarding yourself. Rewards create good feelings of accomplishment, which trains your mind to swim that way again. Which brings us to malicious positivity.
Malicious positivity is the blending of two negative terms: Malicious compliance and toxic positivity. 💀
Malicious compliance is best described as “work schadenfreude.”
Example: “I am going to follow your instructions to the letter because I know it will result terribly for you and I will enjoy seeing this happen at your own hand.”
Toxic positivity is relentless, unrealistic, forced happiness about things that are decidedly not positive without acknowledging that fact.
Example: Someone saying to you, “Your dog is dead? Well, at least you don’t have to buy dog food anymore!”
But if you bring together the realistic, self-oriented decision-making of malicious compliance, and toxic positivity’s insane ability to find good news, you get: Malicious positivity.
Malicious positivity is the ability to see the world as it really is by giving equal likelihood to the positive as well as to the negative, and using this information to make decisions that ultimately benefit your wellbeing.
How? By:
Realising you have a choice what to think about/how to perceive a situation
Recognising that there are chaotic, malicious, AND positive options
And then: choosing the more positive thought. Not because you don’t see the other options, but simply because it serves you best.
Benefits: You get all of the mental benefits of proving “someone”, i.e., the world, wrong. You get the feel-good feeling of being generous in spirit. And you start to see that regardless of how you VIEW an action - the action doesn’t change. All that changes is how you are impacted by it - and you’re impacted much, much less.
Stuck in a grocery store line? Reward yourself by thinking not just that everyone else is also having a bad day (chaos), but by realising that you are truly experiencing what it means to be human, right next to other humans (malicious positivity).
Struggling with tough feedback at work? Reward yourself by thinking not just that your human-in-charge was typing too fast (chaos), but that your ability to take on that criticism without doubting your abilities is what makes you strong (malicious positivity).
Trust me: Once you can start seeing all of these options, the blue ocean will appear - in your work-life and life-life. It’s like the sixth sense, but with less dead people. 🙂
Heads up! Next week is our Nice Work Advice column, and we’re taking all questions related to mindset! Ask your question via Instagram, leave a comment on Substack, or respond to any newsletter you receive to your email. We’ll share it + our answers in this monthly column.
Wishing you positive thoughts (with all the maliciously compliant energy),
Rachel