“Keep your eye upon the doughnut, and not upon the hole.”

Walk into any wellness podcast, self-help book, or motivational Instagram post, and you will eventually encounter a version of these words: “Keep your eye upon the doughnut, and not upon the hole.” The quote has become a fixture of contemporary optimism, a kind of shorthand for the entire philosophy of positive thinking. It appears in business seminars and grief counseling sessions. People invoke it when they are learning to drive, starting a new job, navigating a divorce, or facing a diagnosis. The image is almost comically simple—a doughnut, a hole, a choice about where to direct your attention—yet it has persisted across more than a century of American life, adapting itself to every generation’s particular anxieties. What makes this longevity especially striking is that almost nobody knows who said it first. The quote travels through the world almost wholly unmoored from an author’s name, yet it travels nonetheless, passed hand to hand, screen to screen, like a piece of genuine folk wisdom.

Before we can understand what this saying means, we must first clear away a dense thicket of false attribution. The quote is frequently assigned to Mae West, the actress and wit, as though she had uttered it during one of her famous quips. It is also commonly credited to Adlai Stevenson, the diplomat and twice-failed presidential candidate, sometimes with the detail that he said it in a speech. Neither attribution withstands scrutiny. No credible source links the line to West or Stevenson; these are the kinds of attributions that circulate because they sound plausible—Mae West was known for her one-liners, after all—and because they give the quote an author’s face to remember. The truth is less tidy. The verse is genuinely anonymous, born from no single mind that history has recorded. What can be documented, however, is its paper trail through American print culture, and the crucial role played by one man who did not write it but who made it so famous that most Americans who know the words know them through his commercial use of it: Adolph Levitt, a Russian-born immigrant who revolutionized doughnut manufacturing and became the unlikely custodian of this piece of wisdom.

The documented history of the verse begins in April 1904, in the pages of The Sun newspaper in New York. A short verse titled “Their Points of View” appeared, containing the seed—though not yet the finished fruit—of the idea: “The optimist the doughnut sees— / The pessimist the hole.” The phrasing is different from what we now know, more abstract and philosophical, less imperative. But the central insight is already there: the same object can be perceived in radically different ways depending on the observer’s temperament. This 1904 version does not tell you what to do; it merely observes that different people see different things. Someone, at some point, was moved to turn observation into advice.

By 1907, the reformer and photojournalist Jacob Riis—famous for his work documenting tenement life in New York—was using close variations of the line in his public speeches. Riis was known for his passionate advocacy, his ability to move audiences, his gift for making abstract social problems viscerally real. That he would embrace a saying about keeping one’s eye on the positive suggests something important: the verse had already begun circulating orally, had already acquired enough cultural weight to be worth repeating by influential people. Riis’s speeches gave the saying amplification, turned it from print into the living voice. But still, no name was attached to it. It was already becoming what it would remain: nobody’s quote and everybody’s.

The version that would crystallize into our modern form appeared in February 1908, in a cartoon published in Judge magazine, illustrated by Grant E. Hamilton. The cartoon bore the caption in all capitals: “DON’T LOOK AT THE HOLE, KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE DOUGHNUT.” This is the closest early match to the phrasing we know today, and it is significant that it emerged in a visual medium—a cartoon, which is to say a joke, a piece of popular culture rather than literature. The saying had the shape of a joke; it worked best when delivered as a sudden reframing, a perspective-shift. Four months later, in June 1908, The Home Missionary magazine printed a close match to the modern wording: “Keep your eye on the doughnut, and not on the hole.” The form was settling. The words were being standardized even as they remained unclaimed.

What emerged by 1924 was the most famous version, the one that would achieve genuine canonical status. By this time the verse had expanded to four lines: “As you ramble on through life, brother, / Whatever be your goal, / Keep your eye upon the doughnut, / And not upon the hole.” Note the address to “brother”—the warmth of intimacy, the sense of person-to-person advice. Note too the word “goal,” which anchors the saying to ambition, to the human project of wanting something and moving toward it. This version balanced accessibility with genuine philosophical weight. It was simple enough for anyone to understand and remember; it was profound enough to have shaped the way people thought about success and failure for more than a century.

But the saying only reached the vast majority of Americans through one specific commercial channel: Adolph Levitt’s Mayflower Doughnuts. Levitt was a Russian-born immigrant who had patented an automatic doughnut machine, a mechanical innovation that made doughnuts cheaper and more standardized. He opened the first Mayflower Doughnuts shop in New York in 1931, during the depths of the Great Depression, and he needed both a business model and a philosophy. By his own account, Levitt found the verse already anonymous in circulation, purchased a framed print of it at a dime store, and was so moved by it that he made it his personal motto. He had it printed on every Mayflower Doughnuts box. He had it painted on the shop walls. He titled it “The Optimist’s Creed,” and through his entrepreneurial success—Mayflower Doughnuts expanded across multiple locations and became a fixture of urban American life—he ensured that millions of people would know these words. Most Americans who have encountered the saying have encountered it not from a book of quotations or a speech, but from a doughnut box. That is a strange and perfect history for a piece of folk wisdom.

To understand the philosophical roots of this saying, we must recognize what it is fundamentally about: perception, choice, and the practice of attention. The saying does not claim that the hole does not exist. It does not deny that doughnuts come with holes, that loss accompanies gain, that every accomplishment has a shadow side. Rather, it observes that the same objective reality can be the occasion for either despondency or hope, depending on where you place your focus. This is not magical thinking; it is a recognition of a genuine psychological fact—that human beings have some limited but real agency over which aspects of a situation they emphasize, and that this emphasis shapes their experience and their behavior. The saying emerged at a moment—the early 20th century—when American culture was grappling intensely with the question of optimism versus pessimism. The Gilded Age had given way to the Progressive Era; industrial capitalism had created both unprecedented prosperity and unprecedented suffering. How should one think about such a world? Should one focus on possibility or on injustice? The doughnut and the hole became a way of holding this tension without resolving it, by asserting that the choice itself is yours to make.

One of the reasons the saying has endured is precisely this quality of useful ambiguity. It does not pretend that optimism is warranted or that pessimism is foolish. It simply says: you are going to look at something; choose what. This is not so much a claim about reality as it is an instruction for living. It became especially resonant in American culture because it fit perfectly with the American mythology of self-reliance and self-making—the idea that we are not merely passive recipients of fate but active architects of our own experience. Yet it is also humble enough not to claim too much. You cannot change whether the doughnut has a hole. You can only change what you choose to see.

The cultural life of the quote has been remarkably rich, considering its anonymity. Wendy Wasserstein used a variant in her 1990 essay collection “Bachelor Girls,” anchoring the saying to the experience of women navigating complex lives. David Lynch, the filmmaker, quoted it in interviews in 1999, drawn perhaps to its surrealist economy—the way it makes the mundane doughnut carry philosophical weight. Margaret Atwood quoted the 1924 four-line version in her 2000 novel “The Blind Assassin,” embedding it in a text about how we construct narratives and meaning from our lives. These literary invocations matter because they show that the saying has not been confined to self-help culture or commercial use. Serious writers and artists have felt moved to invoke it, recognizing in it something that speaks to the human condition.

In contemporary life, the saying operates as a kind of psychological technology for perspective-shifting. When someone is dwelling on failure, the doughnut-and-hole saying offers a way to redirect attention without dismissing the failure itself. When someone is anxious about a goal that seems large and difficult, the saying reminds them that the goal itself (the doughnut) might be worthy of attention even if it contains difficulty (the hole). It has become a resource for therapists, coaches, teachers, and ordinary people trying to talk themselves and each other through hard moments. On social media, where it circulates constantly in graphic form, it appears alongside images of actual doughnuts, or sunrise over water, or empty roads—all designed to reinforce the visual simplicity of the metaphor.

What explains the continued urgency of these words? In part, it is that the problem they address—the tendency to fixate on obstacles, gaps, and lacks—is a permanent feature of human psychology. We are, by temperament, often more alert to what is missing than to what is present. This was true in 1904 and 1931 and remains true today. The doughnut verse does not claim to cure this tendency but rather offers a gentle rebuke and a practical invitation: look again. In another sense, the saying endures because it honors both realism and hope. It does not ask you to deny the hole; it asks you to see the doughnut as well. This balance—this refusal to choose between acknowledging hardship and pursuing purpose—feels increasingly valuable in a world of extremes, where conversations tend toward either bitter complaint or toxic positivity. The doughnut and the hole: both are there. The choice is yours. That is wisdom that remains urgent, anonymous or not.