Believing the Advantages

   I am not too sure if Buddhism really has a narrative related to seeing the hidden advantages in all situations. I have certainly read the notion that one constructs one's experiences and can have any number of thoughts about them, but I don't think I have heard too much about 'seeing advantages' in situations. What I am referring to is more like an idea that one always has the choice to view some situation as potentially favorable, either to themselves or to others. In fact, it makes pragmatic sense to do so, because seeing advantages can help the person to act with a good or productive outcome in mind.
  I am afraid that I have to reference William James again, because his essay on "Will to Believe" is really tapping into this notion. He uses the example that if a person truly believes that their loved one does not love them in return, that person might give up making efforts to do things to advance their connection with the person. It's as though the pessimism that a person has will choke them in some way, or prevent them from making the first step in allowing the relationship to happen. What James perhaps doesn't quite answer is the question of how a person cultivates the will to believe. Is it simply a choice to do so, or do people build their convictions based on experience and testimony? Even in the case I just cited, there still needs to be a reason that will compel a person to believe, and James has to supply that reason. Can I choose my beliefs? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that I can influence my beliefs by adopting open attitudes toward what I am learning or doing. No, in the sense that I am not likely to choose to believe things that are not worth believing in the long run. For instance, I can believe to my heart's content that I will be the next Prime Minister, but believing so is only going to burn out the energy that I could just as well put into more beneficial and realistic goals that I could set for myself. While one could muster a lot of will power to believe in something far out of one's experiences, they would still need to sustain the energy and time to proximate the goal in some way.
     Perhaps one way to see all this is that a belief is a seed, but it is one of many seeds. Like any thought I have, it vies with other thoughts for attention. If I don't do anything to either try to confirm the belief or test it through action, it's possible that the belief will simply vanish on its own, since otherwise, the belief has nothing upon which it can base its continuation. The more I can sustain an energy and behavior toward that belief to the point of investing myself in it, the more likely it will live on in the mind. The belief becomes true not because of one single fact pointing it , but because of the multitude of facets which tend to support its existence.