Turn on the evening news, and you’ll see another day’s catalog of terror and trauma. Read the business page, and you’ll see which local company is downsizing. Our big-picture perspective can be shaped, or misshaped, by attention-grabbing events.
The news doesn’t cover people who had a particularly good day and return home to their happy families. The news doesn’t cover the continued existence of a healthy company.
Don’t let the negative picture of the world cloud your perspective.
Anthony Johnson, a physics professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, works with lasers that travel in femtoseconds, a million times faster than nanoseconds.
Anthony is the son of a bus driver, from a family where every male drove a bus or a train for a living. Almost everyone he knew growing up struggled just to keep up with the bills and keep a roof over their heads.
But Anthony saw a path for himself in high school, then college, and finally graduate school. And now he is on the lookout for the next generation of physicists.
“Too many young people have written science off; that’s a real tough battle we have. If we don’t show students an example, they won’t dream of careers in science or anything else. Too many give up because there’s so much ‘give up’ around them.”
Anthony explains he wouldn’t have gotten where he is “without some great people who invested in me and helped me see what I could do.” He adds, “I’m not just going to sit here without going to the next generation and showing them what we do here. Because what we do could shape the future.”
People are seven times more likely to be optimistic about their personal future than they are about the future of their generation.
Arnett 2000