Pragmatic and practical. It may well be time to rehabilitate the first of these words, because I have lost track of the ideological interpretation of it, sometimes positive and sometimes negative. It indicates an attitude or approach which makes effective use of real, current conditions to gain some advantage, rather than passive hope or theoretical expectation that fairness and natural justice will bring satisfaction.

So a pragmatic approach is also a practical one, based on real-life practice and experience rather than relying on other-worldly theory and idealistic principles. Interestingly, though, the adverb "practically" means "almost" (practically all countries, practically everyone, practically dead), which in fact means NOT REALLY SO from a strictly correct, academic standpoint, but APPARENTLY SO from ordinary people's everyday, pragmatic point of view.