Embracing optimism, to become a hero | Valentina Hernandez | TEDxPadova

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How can one turn optimism into her core business and a lifestyle?
Sunscious Limited CEO, Valentina Hernandez, heads the international web developers team who built Sunscious, a social network that's focused on sharing uplifting, geotagged contents, thus mitigating the depressing effect of all the bad news around us and highlighting the good things that are happening in the world.

The ultimate thing
to determine conclusively

is whether you're in a comedy
or a tragedy.

To quote Italo Calvino,

the ultimate meaning
to all stories is they have two faces:

the continuity of life,
and the inevitability of death.

Tragedy, you die. Comedy, you get hitched.

Unlike the character in this movie,
we don't have

a storyteller to decide what we're in for.

And certainly, we don't belong
to a particular literary style.

Nevertheless,
I'd like to draw a parallel

between what the character
of "Stranger Than Fiction" goes through

and what goes on within our minds.

Namely, our inner voice

that continously judge our actions,

thus affecting our choices

and consequently our happiness.

Now let me take you
through an experiment:

turn your head and introduce yourselves,

You have five seconds, please go ahead.

A study by Brigham Young University, Utah

proved that isolation and loneliness

are worse for your health than obesity.

Isolation and loneliness predict
a premature death before 65 years of age,

so don't think that,
just because you're young,

you're free from such risks!

As for us, we just introduced ourselves,
and maybe, with a bit of luck,

we just slightly increased
our life expectancy!

You may now wonder,

do isolation and loneliness
have something to do with optimism,

the topic I'm here to talk about today?

Well, both are very well-known
symptoms of depression,

which is precisely the most
chronic form of pessimism,

or the most pathological one:
it's a total lack of optimism.

And if you think that depression
isn't something worth focusing on,

I invite you to watch the statistics:

by 2020, at least in the United States,

depression is expected to become
the leading cause of death

after cardiovascular diseases.

Let's talk about optimism.

How would you define it?

Is it a way of life, an intellectual
posture, an emotion?

Someone already asked this question.

And thankfully, he did it
with an empirical, scientific mindset.

One of the first
was professor Lionel Tiger,

who in 1979 wrote
"Optimism: the Biology of Hope"

where he approached optimism
from an anthropological standpoint.

According to professor Tiger,

optimism was a form
of biological adaptation

our prehistorical ancestors
developed to survive.

Essentially, man tends to stay away

from all those activities
he deems too risky.

Our ancestor, on the other hand,
always had an inner drive

to get out of the caves
and find something to eat.

One of the hypotesis involves
the release of endorphines,

and their analgesical,
euphorizing properties.

Let's say our ancestors

may have been the first
extreme sports practitioners.

But more recent studies
- we're in 1990 now -

introduced optimism as a learned quality,
or as a result of experience.

Professor Martin Seligman,
from University of Pennsylvania,

first introduced the concept
of explicatory style.

Which is just another name

for all the explanations we give
all the time for everything around us.

whether they're hurdles or good news.

This explicatory style

can be either optimist, pessimist,
temporary or permanent.

And depending on our explicatory style,

we continously influence
our success, in every field:

from work to health,
from politics to religion,

in mass social situations, in sport.

Let's talk about health for a moment.

Optimist explicatory style

has a remarkable influence
on health, in at least three ways.

Just to start with, an optimist's
immune system is more reactive,

so they stay in better health.

Plus, optimists have a higher self-esteem,

and this brings them to take
more care of themselves.

And third, they can count
on a stronger social network,

engaged as they are in longer-lasting
love and friendship bonds,

two things with a proven
positive influence on health.

And what can we say
about the business world?

Optimists - and here we quote professor
Snyder, from the University of Kansas -

have a proactive attitute
which is key in business success,

and we're talking about planning.

Optimists tend to seek
sound evidence around them,

in order to support
their optimistic approach to life.

They're also more willing to persist.

And you know it better than me:

when you start a project,
you're driven by an idea.

Excitement is fundamental,
at the beginning;

but persistence will make
all the difference over time.

So now we can start asking:

is there a direct correlation
between optimism and happiness?

Does optimism lead to greater happiness,

because they have
better interpersonal relationships,

a better health and more success at work?

Or alternatively,

people who for any reason
were already happier

develop a robust optimism over time?

Happiness, we know,
it's 50% dependent on our gene set

- and there's little we can do
about it, but accepting ourselves.

But another 40 and 10% depend
on circumstances and thoughts.

The question is,
can we influence this second half?

In 2012, facebook
already answered this question.

Facebook ran a study on 700,000 users,

and they did it without their consent

- but that's not our point here.

And in this study, they segmented

the contents displayed
in the users' newsfeed,

positively or negatively.

They wanted to see whether their
selection could affect users' mood.

And the results confirmed the hypothesis:

targeted with negative contents,

users in turn started to post their own
negative contents, and viceversa.

All the data pointed at optimism

as a key factor
for success and happiness,

one that can be induced and influenced.

So me and a group
of other guys, we had a dream

and in 2014 we started
considering the creation

of a virtual space segmented
with positive news.

News could be both aggregated

or created by users.

And so Sunscious was born.

Sunscious is a positively
segmented social network,

working with geolocalization,

which allows a real-time monitoring

of the levels of optimism
around the world,

with an easy-to-use interface.

But segmentation wasn't enough for us:

we wanted to create a space
where virtual behaviours could be metered,

in order to generate statistics

that are socioeconomically meaningful,
and of course optimist.

But we had a challenge before us:

it's not easy to draw people
into a new social network,

you know it well.

Plus, we wanted to fight isolation
which, as we've said before,

is a critical component to close the loop.

So we invented an app.

The app is still in a development stage,

it's been premiered in Las Vegas
during the CES exhibition

and it also received positive feedback

from a United Nations agency,
a few days ago in New York.

This app is a virtual space

where in real time people
at a few kilometers' distance

can start cooperating
on a problem to solve.

So basically I can post a help request,

and turn a perfect stranger
into my spontaneous hero,

because this person
can help me in real time.

This project, like many others,

is just one of the countless shapes
optimism can take,

once research and innovation
are rooted in it.

My team and I, we invite you
to take optimism into account

in your personal and professional choices.

Finally, at the beginning
of this speech, we introduced ourselves.

Some of you may have
a better memory than mine,

and still remember their name;

others may just remember the face.

But the point is,
they're not strangers anymore.

And their problems are no longer
that far, separated from us.

And this, believe me,
it's a chance to be useful,

to turn ourselves
into other people's heroes -

and mostly, it's a reason
to be optimistic for the future.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)