A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about dealing with negative people in our everyday lives. You know, the type that see misery in everything? They're like voracious "energy vampires" that drain the sunny disposition out of everyone else around them. Then a curious thing happened, I started noticing another kind of person, best illuminated by a story from the Titanic.

We all know what happened. Big "unsinkable" ship hits an iceberg without enough lifeboats. Many people die in the freezing cold waters of the North Atlantic. Going over it again, reminded me that the massive ship took just a few hours to sink, beginning with an almost unnoticeable list to starboard. I was struck by the many passengers who had a chance at getting a seat in one of the early lifeboats which went out half-empty. They refused to set foot in the icy blackness of the rescue craft even after noticing that the ship was listing and being warned by the stewards to leave.

Then they went back into their nice, warm cabins and died...

It's almost as if there are people out there so blinded by the rose-colored glasses they're wearing, that they fail to respond to danger in time. I have a good friend in Europe that loves photography. A deep bond with nature finds him visiting national parks in order to get the perfect picture, alone...

He gets so consumed with framing his shots and hitting his angles, that he has no situational awareness whatsoever. He tunes out the entire world and only sees what's in his viewfinder. I joked with him one day that if he ever visited the US and went out west, that unlike his country, we have wild animals (and wild people) here who will do him harm, so he needed to be on point. This is the type of person that never listens to warnings and will cut people off who show concern for his well-being.

He spotted the iceberg, but had no binoculars

On April 14 1912, British sailor Fredrick Fleet was on lookout duty and spotted the iceberg which the ship hit at 11:40 pm. He'd been denied a pair of binoculars which would have allowed him to see the hazard much sooner, so that Titanic would have avoided hitting it. By 12:25 am on April 15th the first boat was loaded up with women and children. It contained 28 people even though it had a capacity of 65... Passenger John Hugo Ross was still aboard Titanic in his pajamas and refused to believe the sinking was imminent, saying: "It will take more than an iceberg to get me off this ship."

His body was never found...

Masabumi Hosono had no such problem listening to the order to abandon ship. Since he was Japanese, at first, he was barred from the boat deck. Masabumi seized his chance when the officer's back was turned and hopped into one of the last two seats available. The difference here is that he answered the knock on his cabin door and with quick thinking, saved his life. Instead of dreaming happy thoughts, Mr. Hosono processed the information right in front of him and took decisive action.

"I wasn't going to die there"

On September 11 2001, Susan Frederick was at her job on the 80th floor of the north tower at One World Trade Center. Her work at software company TheBEAST, brought her there on that fateful day. Feeling the shudder of the building as the plane hit, she began making her way down with the thought that she was not about to die. Reaching the third floor just over an hour later, the building shook again. Unbeknownst to them, the south tower had just collapsed. Four minutes after making it out of the doomed structure, they turned to watch the fall of the north tower as well...

Rick Rescorla saved 2,700 lives