In a world overloaded with communication tools, it’s too easy to get information from the other side of the world. But with the unbelievable advantages come the disadvantages as well.

We are being overloaded with information through the media, and much of it is overdramatic and inaccurate. Open the news or even social media, and you’d think the world is ending. This is making it easy to fall into the negativity mindset: the notion that everything in the world is going wrong, and we have no choice but to watch it do so.

A friend of mine, who’s naturally an optimist, read this book and suggested it to me. I was skeptical at first, but as I read through the book, I realized that Hans Rosling wasn’t just talking about statistics—he was talking about shifting mindsets and being skeptical in the right way.

The human being is wired to be negative. Yes, there are people who are positive and barely share a negative thought about themselves or anyone else, but beyond all of it, we are still rooted in negativity, as our brains are designed for survival. We tend to notice the bad more than the good because it helps us survive, and has helped us survive for all these years on Earth. Our ancestors relied on this negativity instinct to get through daily life.

But what was once an extremely useful instinct has now turned into our disadvantage.  We are focusing too much on what's going wrong over what's improving.

The media capitalizes on this fear as it guarantees our attention, and that is what they rely on for a livelihood. They have to overdramatize it or get ignored.

Poverty, violence, and global crises always seem worse than ever, yet history proves otherwise.

Factfulness advocates for a realist mentality—taking everything with a pinch of salt before confirming if they are accurate. But that doesn’t mean you ignore the problems of the world and live a selfish, self-contained life. Being a “realist” means relying on data rather than relying on gut-wrenching anxiety.

We love to divide the world into black-and-white categories. It’s easy to imagine the world that way, and we get carried away with it for everything. We’re inclined to think that people are rich or poor, and countries are developed and underdeveloped. Despite the terms in between, this is what we ultimately stand by in the back of our minds.

Hans Roslings show us in this book that this is completely false. Both the rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped countries are minorities in the world.

Understanding that most people in the world are in between those extreme categories helps reduce the negative instinct that there is a “them” out there that’s poor, and no one can save them.

Things are bad all around the world, yes. Not everything, but there is a lot of things going wrong. But does that mean things are not improving as well?

Hans Rosling uses several examples to prove this point, and some of the most prominent are: infant mortality rates, extreme poverty, electricity access, gender equality in education, and the number of deaths caused by diseases and accidents.

Although our “us” vs. “them” instinct leads us to believe that infant mortality rates and extreme poverty are high in “underdeveloped” countries, the stats show that it is a record low and only getting better all around the world. In fact, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has dropped to half over the last 20 years. What a crazy development over just twenty years!

So have access to electricity, vaccination, and gender equality in education. Worldwide, 30-year-old men have spent 10 years in school while 30-year- old women have spent 9 years in school, 80% of one-year-olds have been vaccinated against some disease, and 80% of the world has some access to electricity.

A lot of bad is happening, yes; so many deaths from pointless, brutal wars and unbelievable natural disasters, and these are tragic. We have to share our condolences with those who have to face these problems. But that doesn’t mean we have to take a depressed, hopeless attitude towards the world—things can be bad, and better at the same time. This is one of the core elements of this book.

It's hard to make accurate decisions when fear grabs us by the ears, and we end up making catastrophic assumptions. Even if a problem doesn’t need immediate action, we rush it and make it worse. This is why we need to overcome the fear and urgency instincts by taking a breath, looking at the historical trends and real stats before drawing any conclusions about events in the world.

Like the last section pointed out, things can be bad, but behind all of it, things are slowly, invisibly, getting better.

So we shouldn’t let isolated tragic events make us take any conclusions or attitudes about the world. A natural disaster on the other side of the world doesn’t mean the world is ending. A plane crash out of millions of flights flown over the year doesn’t mean flying is unsafe. A multiple-vehicle accident on the highway doesn’t mean the highway is unsafe.

Look at the numbers, and you’ll see that these things are always the minority. We should be sad and share our condolences, help those who are caught in such tragic circumstances, but know that these things are only exceptions.

Don’t read this book and think you should be insensitive about other people’s plight. Hans Rosling was a physician who researched and worked all around the world, helping people from all kinds of backgrounds, and even in pandemics like Ebola in Africa. He is not a blind optimist who accepts every tragic event as a part of life and moves on, and he does not preach such an attitude.

Worry, take action, but don’t let fear control it. Look at the numbers, the history, the scales of improvement before taking any serious decisions.

And this is why it's called Factfulness. 

A book everyone should read.