Being Olaf




It’s been said by more than enough people how easy or difficult being cynical is, and how difficult or easy being happy or hopeful is.

For me, if you’re the kind of person that wants to rain on people’s parade all the time – be it the fact that you got through airport security in record time (“They probably got us through because they wanted us to shop more”), you went to the beach on Texas coast not too far from an oil refinery (“Was the water brown? Did the oil refinery make the air smell? Was your dog poisoned?”), or that church was fun (“It’s full of hypocrites being spoon-fed lies blah blah blah”) – then you become very boring, very quickly.

Cynics don’t have a balance. They dislike everything. A cynic won’t let you say that there might be a positive aspect to Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, and the cynic on the other side will say the same about Barack Obama or Jeremy Corbyn. On both sides breeds a spirit of negativity that isn’t funny, it’s plain mean.

I know, because I have been that guy. All too often.

And I’ve noticed that when I’m positive, nicer, put the politics in my cowboy boots, put away the righteous rage (apart from questioning why my teams make the same mistakes on an alarmingly consistent basis) I become a happier person.

I've also noticed that that someone was is permanently angry isn't the guy or girl you want at a party, because parties are meant to be positive places.
  
For me, the cynicism comes out in two places: Politics and sports. I'm not going to get into the political side because I don't want to offend anyone, but for me I can blindly yell and scream at my teams, be it in the ground or on the TV (so much so that The Saint Called Jane Ferguson wants me out of the house when I watch my team play college football (thank God I don't gamble)). I ignore the fact that these players for the most part try, that they aren't perfect, and competitive people - which these ladies and gentlemen are - don't like to lose. Sometimes, the opposition is that much better. 

The reason right now why I have been hit by the positivity bug has got nothing to do with the Holiday Spirit (Christian Cynic yelling: "THEY'VE FORGOTTEN ABOUT THE TRUE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS!!"). It was because The Saint Called Jane Ferguson and I went to see Frozen 2. And I fell in love with Olaf, the snowman.

Olaf is full of hope. He doesn’t have a nasty thing to say about anybody. He wants to give hugs to everyone. 

He's the type of guy the cynics and keyboard warriors hate. If he existed in real life they''d call him a ‘deranged individual who needs to take off those rose-tinted glasses and look into the reality of the world we live in’.

But to me, Olaf struck a chord. So much so that I sobbed my eyes out seeing Frozen 2 in the cinema on Saturday night.

Why not have hope for a future? It's a lot better than saying  - and almost wanting - it to go to the crapper (clue: Not me). 

Here are some examples:
  • Then there’s the environment. Buoyed by a push from one of the greatest naturalists in the world, the son of a media mogul (James Murdoch) and a major British TV company, people have been pushed to reduce plastic use. A 16-year old, female environmentalist was given Time’s Person of The Year. Isn’t that cool? She probably doesn’t have as much influence as Donald Trump, but then again, she’s not going for World President. She’s genuinely trying to make a difference. She took a boat across the Atlantic instead of flying across (‘Real’ people got angry because the ship’s captain took a plane across to help with the journey (I MEAN: SHUT. UP)). Governments and corporations to rethink the way that they behave around things like the environment. For years I thought that this was ‘just a PR exercise’, but then it hit me. SO ****ING WHAT? Better a PR exercise than doing nothing at all, right? .
  • And of course, there’s religion, the realist’s ‘opium for the masses’. You talk Christianity, and the ‘realists’ will bang on about cover-ups about child molestation and financial crookedness in the church system, while refusing to talk positively about the church that I belong to in Houston that voluntarily reconstructed a house for a woman in the area JUST BECAUSE IT WAS A GOOD THING TO DO, or St Martin’s, where my wife Janes works at, helping a lot of organisations in the area. I mean, why can’t we just be nice about something?
  • ·      Then there’s the stock markets, see this. Regardless what you think about the orange, weird-headed, ever-tweeting, accused-of-cheating President, the stock market is up 25% this year. In other words, if you’re hanging in there, you are financially winning. Unemployment – at 3.5% - in the USA is at its lowest since 1952 (it reached this point in 2000, too) – and regardless whether you think that this because of The Weird-Headed One or simply a continuation of what Barack Obama did, then people getting jobs pretty great. And we’ve also seen wage growth accelerate, too 

 But when it comes to investing, there is a balance there too. Personally, I love a company surges upwards and my portfolio surges upwards. To be brazen, it makes me wealthier and it makes my investors richer. And that's the lack-of-sugar-coating-truth. I hope it continues going up, but as a wise man said to me recently, “trees don’t go to Heaven”.  That means that I’ve got to keep some money aside just in case the tree falls a bit and I want to add to it.  I also want to take a CEO at face value in his results comments when he talks about how much he loves his employees, but I’ve also got to notice that his comments are tapered to institutions, who own about 80% of S&P companies. The institutions have to keep their own investors happy, which means that if things go badly, he’ll boot a lot of the employees he loves. Probably before the investors want to boot him. But if a CEO and a company are optimistic about the future, then that’s a pretty good thing. Just read a little bit in the annual report than the CEO may have forgotten to mention, OK? 

So this Christmas/Hannukah/Festivus just remember: It’s pretty cool to be Olaf.

Alex Ferguson

P.S. Listen, I get that bad things happen. I have seen the worst of it with my very own eyes.  But I also know that hope happens, too.



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