Unlock the Insights That Changed My Life
Each week, I share a glimpse of my ideas and perspectives on life in short 5-minute emails. But there’s so much more depth to explore.
Waking up each morning is like spinning life’s roulette wheel - never knowing what bad thing is going to happen today.
That seems like a very grim way to look at things, but that’s how it is.
The amount of moments, seconds and minutes that we have in a day opens up an infinite number of chances for things to go wrong in 24 hours.
You can meet with an accident on your way to work…
Or get into an argument with a colleague…
Or be reprimanded by your boss…
Or find your favourite snack out of stock at the supermarket…
Or have your internet stop working…
Or have your Netflix banned because you’re using it from a different country than your Household…
There’s a lot that can go wrong in a day, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
According to me, that isn’t a good thing or a bad thing.
It’s just how life works.
So then… how do you have a good day?
Alex Hormozi has this quote where he says…
“The single greatest skill you can develop is the ability to stay in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about.”
And that seems redundant or impractical because happiness doesn’t have an ‘ON switch’.
The fact of the matter is that humans are complex beings with complex emotions, and we can’t just “choose” to be happy.
In fact, we are biologically wired to be in a state of stress -
Thanks to our negativity bias, we tend to remember all of the bad things that happen over the good ones.
So, how then can we have a good day?
Let’s zoom out a bit and look at how we might have a ‘bad year’.
Say you had a bad year because…
Your partner broke up with you…
You lost your job…
And someone close to you passed away…
Multiple things are happening here, but does that constitute a whole year?
It doesn’t.
All these things by themselves are just MOMENTS.
Given, they’re not stand-alone, individualistic moments as they play out through time, but at their very core, they are moments that you had.
So if we say we had a bad year, we can probably count the number of bad things that happened on our two hands - about 10 bad ones.
What we tend to do then is magnify these moments by ruminating on them, letting them encapsulate much larger quantities of time than they actually deserve.
And what we very easily overlook is all of the other stuff that happened in the same time period:
For instance…
After your break-up, you meet and fall in love with someone new, or you go on a journey to love yourself more, to figure out who you are rather than who you need to be for someone else.
After losing a job, you got a new one, perhaps in a place that’s much better suited for you.
After your friend passed away, you got to meet all of their friends and family to celebrate all of the amazing memories y’all had with that person (possibly even making new friends in the bargain!).
And that, I think, is a huge part of how we label having a bad day, week, month or year.
Not just reframing how we look at the situation, but relocating the amount of time we spend thinking about it.
Because what we have to remember is that bad things, like we said before, don’t exist in isolation.
Every single thing has consequences that play out over time.
There will ALWAYS be bad consequences. And there will ALWAYS be good ones.
Whether they are involuntary or serendipitous, or whether we decide to take control of them to build something better from them.
And it’s hard, but it’s up to us to choose which ones we want to give more attention to.
But if we focus on the good ones and try to maximize, optimize and take advantage of them, the thing that we will end up remembering and feeling is not the bad thing that happened, but the good that came out of it.
(Side note: Life would not be meaningful without struggle. If we did not have bad moments, happiness would become our baseline. It would become our ‘normal’. And if you’re happy all the time, then really, you’re just feeling normal all the time.)
So go on…
Have a bad day.
I dare you.
🙋🏽♂️Found this newsletter useful?
You can support my work by buying me a coffee. ☕
PS: This is by no means an obligation. You are welcome to scroll past this section and move on to the rest of the newsletter.
But if you want to, and have the means to, feel free to buy me a coffee or two. :)
I will be equally grateful if you share this post with a friend who you think it might help. 👇🏼
Currently Consuming:
Pods
Books
James Clear’s “Atomic Habits”
Mitch Albom’s “Tuesdays with Morrie” (Trying our fiction for this first time in more than a decade)
If you enjoyed reading this newsletter, or think it would be helpful to one of your friends, use one of the buttons below :)