POSITIVE VALENCE by Jim Collins

“You know, there's one theme that just comes back over and over again, for me when I met with Frances, which is just, sheer, unreasonable positive valence. Let me explain how important this is right? I've seen her in any number of situations or in conversations with me, where her—she can get discouraged like anyone, I've seen her get discouraged about things. She can get discouraged about the tone of the conversation in the nation. She can be discouraged about, uh, the magnitude of the problems that we face. She can be discouraged about the meanness of people that does not need to be there. I mean, she does get discouraged. But her fundamental response to things is one of, if you think of positive and negative valence, it's just overwhelming double positive valence. And the power of just hitting anything, even if you're discouraged, with a positive valence is infectious. And, it's kind of like, we don't have time to wallow around, we can be discouraged but not dispirited, in some way. And I find, I go back to that over and over again, because there are any number of times where I can get down—I can get discouraged AND dispirited, or I will certainly look out and see a whole litany of brutal facts, or things that we ought to be afraid of, or whatever it happens to be, and then I just kind of think of her shrugging it off and getting up and going forward—on the move, very positive, on the balls of her feet. And all of my interactions with her have this sort of underlying sense of discouragement that the world isn't as it should be, wrapped in a whole package, which is, but we're going to deal with it with positive valence.”