I recently saw a recording of Viktor Frankl suggesting something beautiful. He puts forward that optimists are the true "realists" and that a realist is a pessimist:
"You know, you won't believe it. With gray hair at my age, I started taking flying lessons recently. Do you know what my flying instructor told me? "If you are starting here, wish to get here, say east, heading for this, and you have a crosswind, you will drift and you will land here. So you have to do what the pilots call crabbing." He told me C-R-A-B, crabbing. You have to head for north of this airfield. If you are heading toward this airfield, then you will actually land below the airfield. But if you head for above it, you actually land on it.
This holds also for individuals. If we take an individual as they really are, we make them worse. But if we overestimate them... we take them as they are.
If we seem to be idealists and are overestimating, overrating individuals, and looking at them that high here above, you know what happens? We promote them to what they really can be. Thus we have to be idealists, in a way, because then we wind up as the true realists.
And you know who has said this? "If we take an individual as they are, we make them worse. But if we take an individual as they should be, we make them capable of becoming what they can be." This was not my flight instructor, this was not me, this was Goethe. He said this verbally!
Now you will understand why in one of my writings, I once said: "This is the most apt maxim and motto for any psychotherapeutic activity."
If you don't recognize a person's will to meaning, a person's search for meaning, you make it worse. You make them dull, you make them frustrated. You still add and contribute to their frustration. While if you see principles in this person, even in this so-called criminal, or juvenile delinquent, or drug abuser, and so forth, there must be a, what we call, “spark.” Yes, a spark of search for meaning. Let's recognize this, let's presuppose it, and then you will elicit it from them, and you will make them become what they, in principle, are capable of becoming."