5.14 (V) Week 5 Video 10 - Three Strategies
[MUSIC] » Aloha my friend, welcome back. Has this ever happened to you that you try to give somebody really great looking a hug and you hit a mirror? [SOUND] » [LAUGH] » I hate it when that happens. Hola, so good to have you back. In the previous video, we talked about the differences among three approaches to goals. Passionate pursuit of passion, indifferent pursuit of passion, and dispassionate pursuit of passion. I suggested that the dispassionate pursuit of passion, the 6th Habit of the Highly Happy, is the best approach to take from the prospective of maximizing happiness. This approach involves having a preference for certain outcomes over other outcomes before these outcomes occur, which is obviously important if you want to set goals and pursue them, but not judging outcomes after they've occurred, which mitigates the negativity from categorizing certain outcomes as bad outcomes. The question that follows is, how do you pull this off? How do you pull of this seemingly intricate mind switch from, what I called, pre-occurrence preference to post-occurrence non-judgementalism. You may also be wondering whether it's a weird and even delusional thing to do, to change one's mind about outcomes before versus after they've occurred. Let me try and address these questions by outlining three strategies that will help you practice and nurture the dispassionate pursuit of passion. The first strategy involves reflecting on past negative outcomes. Let me tell you about the strategy by describing an exercise that I sometimes have my students do. In this exercise I ask my students to first think of something negative that has just happened to them like, failing to get a good grade, or falling sick, etc. I then asked them to think of a similar negative event from the past, something that happened to them way back when they were, say, teenagers. Maybe it was a failure to get into a dream school, or maybe it was breaking a bone just before the summer holidays. I then asked these students to reflect on how they viewed those same negative elements from the past. Now, what typically happens is that the students discover that they've changed their mind about those past negative events. At the time that they happened, they may have been very painful, but now in retrospect the students don't see those events the same way. With the passage of time, it seems like these negative events lose their sting. Why does this happen? Because, as Steve Jobs said, you can't connect to the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. In other words, what seemed like a negative event when it happened, gently turns out to be less negative, or even positive in retrospect, because we get to see the reason which they have paved the way for positive outcomes. The student who failed to get into his dream school, for example, may realize that that's the outcome that led him to work really hard, and that's why he's now in the current school right now. Likewise, the student who broke a leg may realize that that's what led her to learn C++ while lying down in a hospital bed, because of which she's a hot job candidate now. A lot of studies, particularly in an area of research called affective mis-forecasting, show that we routinely change our minds about past negative events. These findings show that we tend to overestimate both the intensity and the duration for which we will negative after a bad outcome occurs. When we break up with someone we imagine that life is going to suck from then on. In reality, if you've experienced that, you know that we move on and life doesn't suck for as long or as intensely as we originally thought. There are many reasons why we misforecast the negativity from these bad outcomes. I won't get into the details here in the interest of time, but if you're interested in this line of research you can check out the reference section for this week. If you do the exercise that I just described, that is you recall an event from your past that at that time that it happened seemed intensely negative. And now you ask yourself how you feel about it. I'm quiet confident that you too will see that you have changed your mind about that event. What's really interesting about this is that as Professor Lubomski noted in the quote that I read out in the previous video, the events that we later come to cherish are often the ones that we found to be the most negative when they happened. You may have hated the grueling climb up Mount Kilimanjaro. But, after a few months have passed, it might turn out to be the highlight of the year. Similarly, you might have hated living in a strange new country while you were there, but after a few years, or even a few months, you may look upon that same experience with a wistful nostalgia. So, the first strategy for instilling the dispassionate pursuit of passion involves reminiscing about past negative events, and realizing that if you could change your mind about those events, then there really is no reason why the same thing won't happen with the current negative events. And if you're gonna change your mind about the current negative events later, than why not change them and adopt a more positive attitude towards them right away? One advantage of doing so, is that it will obviously improve your happiness levels right away. Another advantage is that it's going to make you more open to the doors opportunity that seemingly negative event has triggered. And such a positive and resilient outlook towards life, studies show, is a very important determinant of success. For example, as you may remember from week one optimistic in children's agents achieve significantly higher sales than less optimistic ones. This leads me to the second strategy for practicing the dispassionate pursuit of passion which has to do with actively looking for reason which a seemingly negative outcome has triggered positive outcomes. The best way to do this, I think, is through the practice of gratitude. In the second week, we saw how being grateful when positive things happen can mitigate the need for superiority. Obviously, it's easier to be grateful when something positive has happened. But as David Steindeldrass, the famous Catholic Benedictine monk noted in his very popular Ted Talk, we could actually be grateful even when negative things happen. Let me play you the relevant clip from his talk. You'll first hear Steindeldrass say that we cannot be grateful for negative things like violence or unfaithfulness or bereavement. But soon after, you hear him say that although we can't be grateful for these negative things, we can be grateful in every moment. For what? That's what I'm gonna have him tell you. Listen. » We cannot be grateful for violence, for war, for oppression, for exploitation, on the personal level we cannot be grateful for the loss of a friend, for unfaithfulness, for bereavement. But I didn't say we can be grateful for everything. I said, we can be grateful in every given moment. For the opportunity. And even when we are confronted with something that is terribly difficult, we can rise to this occasion and respond to the opportunity that is given to us. It isn't as bad as it might seem, actually when you look at it and experience it, you find that most of the time, what is given to us is opportunity to enjoy and the only message because we are rushing through life and we are not stopping to see the opportunity but once in a while something very difficult is given to us and when this difficult thing occurs to us, it's a challenge to rise to that opportunity. And we can rise to it by learning something, which is sometimes painful. Learning patience, for instance, we have been told that the road to peace is not a sprint, but is more like a marathon. That takes patience. That's difficult. It may be to stand up for your opinion,to stand up for your conviction, that's an opportunity that is given to us to learn, to suffer, to stand up. All these opportunities are given to us, but they are opportunities, and those who avail themselves of those opportunities are the ones that we admire. They make something out of life. And those who fail get another opportunity. We always get another opportunity. That's the wonderful richness of life. » So as you just heard, we could be grateful even when negative things have happened. Not for those negative things that happened, but for the opportunities that arose because of those negative things. And when you actively look or opportunities that a negative event triggers, you're naturally going to be less judgemental about the negatively of that outcome because you recognize that these positive opportunities would not have arisen if the negative event hadn't happened. This brings me to the third and final strategy for practicing the dispassionate pursuit of passion which is builds on some of the ideas that I've discuss so far. This strategy involves an exercise that I call three good things with a twist. In short, the exercise has to do with keeping a journal in which you note three bad things, apparently bad things that happened during the day that later turned out to be good. The idea is to practice the ability to connect the dots for small, everyday negative energy in our life so that it becomes second nature to you, to be nonjudgmental about negative outcomes. This is a very interesting and a very impactful exercise. In fact, for that reason, I've chosen it to be the exercise for this week. But before I let Katherine give you the instructions for it, I wanna cover one other topic that is intricately linked with the dispassionate pursuit of passion. This topic has to do with the adoption of a spiritual attitude, the attitude that whatever happens is for the best. I will discuss what this attitude means, what it has to do with the dispassionate pursuit of passion and whether it is a scientifically valid attitude to adopt in the next video. Until then, arrivederci and see you soon. 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