#280 ‒ Cultivating happiness, emotional self-management, and more | Arthur Brooks Ph.D.
The Peter Attia Drive
Write it down: Learning from failure
"You're writing down your journal. I thought it was an A plus. Turns out my boss thinks I'm a B minus. Your natural tendencies to say, I'm going to go out and drink with my friends and complain about my boss with my partner and then make the discomfort go away. I wanted to go away and make it go away. That's wrong. Write it down. 30 days you come back and you say to yourself, what did I learn? I learned I wasn't as good a fit as I thought for this job. That's number one. I also learned, by the way, that I thought I was going to be bummed out about this for the rest of my life and actually I was bummed out about it for like three days. Interesting. You learn from it because you write down the thing that you learned and that was permanent because you committed it to your executive center. Six months later you come back and say, given the fact that I wasn't as good a fit as I thought, I went on a job market and I found a job for which I am a better fit and I'm a lot happier. And then when you start doing this consistently, you'll start looking forward to writing down things in your failure journal. This is alchemy, practically. You've converted the negative into the positive. There's no good or bad emotions. There's only information. You've treated the emotional information the way you're supposed to. You're learning from the data. And that's how you do it. That's what I like. I'll even a lot better than I saw fluffy clouds today and I'm really grateful for that. Graded to lists are great. I got nothing against gratitude lists, but failure lists. That's powerful. That's actually even better for life. Let's talk about the difference between optimism and hope."
Remember Everything You Learn from Podcasts
