It’s incredibly hard to do something you hate.

Doing something you hate can be a daunting task, and research suggests that it can have significant negative impacts on mental health and well-being. According to Dr. Emma Seppälä, the Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, “When we dislike something, we experience negative emotions such as boredom, frustration, anger, and disgust. These emotions can be harmful to our mental health, contributing to feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression.”

Dr. Seppälä’s findings are supported by a study conducted by the University of Warwick, which found that job dissatisfaction can lead to mental health problems such as anxiety and depression. The study’s lead author, Dr. Chris Boyce, stated that “We consistently find that job satisfaction is positively correlated with both mental and physical health, while job dissatisfaction is correlated with poor mental health.”

Dr. Seppälä emphasizes the importance of finding joy in our daily activities, stating that “Research shows that when we enjoy what we do, we are more productive, creative, and motivated.” This can involve finding new perspectives in which we look at the daily tasks.

Positive outlook

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Positive outlook: optimism is a choice.

How many times has a “setback” led to a positive opportunity?

This ability—to see the good in an inherently challenging situation—is the Emotional Intelligence competence called Positive Outlook. A positive Outlook refers to our ability to see the best in people, situations, and events. When people have a positive outlook they:

●      See the “glass half full”

●      Cultivate positive emotions in challenging moments

●      Pursue their goals no matter what life throws their way

●      Focus on what’s working

●      See the best in themselves and others

●      Leverage strengths in order to solve problems and create productive outcomes

On a personal level, the more positive emotions we experience, the better our health and wellbeing.

Change your role to change a paradigm

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If you want to make a significant change, work on your paradigms, the way in which you see and interpret the world. And the best way to change your paradigm is to change your role.

may get promoted to be a new project manager at work. You may become a new mother or a new grandfather. You may take on new community responsibility. Suddenly your role has changed and you see the world differently and better behaviors naturally flow out of the changed perspective.

Sometimes role changes are external events, such as a change in job responsibility. But other times we can change our role just by changing our mindset or our perception of a situation.

~ Covey, Stephen R.. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

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Surprizes

We tend to think that what we think is true. And because we think something is true, we ignore information that might tell us it’s not true.

Charles Darwin deliberately looked for thoughts that disagreed with his own. He wrote, “whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from memory than favorable ones.” Darwin was out for truth, not to confirm his view of the world.

“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change,” Marcus Aurelius said. “For I seek the truth, by which no one ever was truly harmed. Harmed is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance.”

Surprises alert you to flawed thinking. When results are not what you expected. When facts disagree with you. When someone does something unexpected. “What surprise tells you,” Adam Robinson says, “is that your model of the world is incorrect.” And when your model of the world is incorrect, you need to figure out why.

When you catch yourself saying “that doesn’t make any sense,” “that shouldn’t happen,” “I didn’t expect that,” you’re surprised. That’s your cue to pay attention.

Surprises are a clue that you’re missing something. Dive and figure out what.

– Shane Parrish, Farnam Street

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Make decisions that are mostly right, sort-of right, or on-balance right

There are two ways of thinking:

• Binary thinking – right/wrong, yes/no, good/bad, start/finish.
• Directional thinking – moving forward, a step closer, lighter grey/darker grey, an experiment, an opportunity to learn, smart-ish, safer, right-ish, wrong-ish, finished-ish.

Binary thinking feels safe. It creates a world where things are black or white. In the binary world there are start dates and finish dates. Things happen sequentially in a linear, orderly fashion. The largest and most powerful part of our brain loves the idea that this is how the world works. It craves the clarity of a world that unfolds in a straight line. It’s happy if there’s a plan and it takes comfort that if we stick to it, everything will be ok.

Sadly this isn’t how the world works. Success is always in a mess, it unfolds from a world of grey decisions that are ‘directionally correct’.

Success is a network effect from dozens of simultaneous side events coming together over time. The decisions are never easy at the level of high performance – they involve trade-offs and risks.

The way success looks from a distance is as if it was a plan that came to fruition. The way it is behind the scenes is a mess that was moving in vaguely the right direction most of the time.

Directional thinking is suitable in the domain of uncertainty. It’s the thinking required to keep the many moving parts of our life moving ‘roughly’ towards a desirable outcome – more often than not. Directional thinking doesn’t resolve any tension. It doesn’t feel safe or complete. Therefore it requires emotional intelligence.

As a growing person, we must stop looking for answers. Stop the quest for a beggining or an end. Let go of clear boundaries. Make our guidelines broad at best. There are no right answers – only directionally correct answers.

The only way forward in this transformational time is to make decisions that are mostly right, sort-of right, on-balance right based on all the incomplete information we have access to.

Be ok with grey. The best decisions are directionally correct.

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The identification binary

The identification binary is when we view things as either a member of a class or not a member of that class, when in fact, almost every categorization admits edge cases that lie between categories, or fails to categorize some cases.

Examples of complex topics where we often fall into the identification binary:

You’re on our side, or you’re against our side

That’s a cult, or it’s not

She’s right-wing, or she’s not

The antidote to the the identification binary is multi-factor thinking, where we consider the degree to which something has different factors. Multi-factor thinking helps us see people and things as they really are, rather than oversimplifying them or misjudging their characteristics.

Multi-factor thinking involves asking ourselves questions like:

In what ways is this case similar or different from these categories?

Is that example better thought of as lying between two (or three) categories, rather than as being right in the middle of one category?

If I ignore labels for a second, what traits does this case have?

Which side do you fall in? The identification binary side or multi-factor thinking side? No, better question is – to what degree you align with either of these sides?

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The goodness binary thinking

The goodness binary is when we view things as either good or bad, positive or negative, or moral or immoral, when, in fact, there is most often a mix of “good” and “bad” features when we consider complex, hotly-debated topics (even if, all things considered, one side really is better).

Examples of complex topics where we often fall into the goodness binary:

Socialism is good / bad

Religion is good / bad

That book is good / bad

The solution to goodness binary thinking is grey thinking, where we accept that good things usually have some bad elements, that bad things usually have some good elements, and that many things lie somewhere in the middle. Grey thinking makes us more effective at identifying solutions (because it allows us to better consider necessary tradeoffs) and helps us avoid accidentally harming the world through misguided good intentions.

Grey thinking involves us asking ourselves questions like:

What are the pros and cons of this?

Who benefits from this, and who is harmed?

What value does this thing I dislike create, even if this sort of value is not the kind of value I most care about?

Goodness thinking is one part of the reasons that keeps us away from full spectrum thinking and a deliberate choices we make (eg. to take a pause and ask those questions) makes us a better person.

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The truth binary thinking

The truth binary is when we view a statement as simply true or false, correct or incorrect. But on complex topics, simple viewpoints are often partially true and partially false, or true some percent of the time and false the rest of the time. Furthermore, our knowledge of truth is limited, so we should have degrees of confidence rather than certainty. If we want to be right more often, we should have thoughts like “I’m 90% confident that…” or “I’m 60% confident that” rather than “I believe that…”

Examples of complex topics where people often fall into the truth binary:

I believe / don’t believe that harsh prison sentences for violent crime make society safer

I believe / don’t believe that we should end the COVID-19 lockdowns as soon as possible

I believe / don’t believe in the effectiveness of western medicine

The solution to the truth binary is probabilistic thinking, where we consider our level of confidence in our beliefs, avoid having 100% confidence in anything, and consider in what situations a view could be true vs. in what situations it could be false. This kind of thinking is more likely to get us closer to the truth than thinking in a truth binary.

Probabilistic thinking involves asking ourselves questions like:

What do I think the chance is that this viewpoint is correct?

How often do I expect that this viewpoint is correct, and how often would I expect it to be wrong?

How surprised would I be if it turned out I was mistaken on this issue?

The more we move towards probabilistic thinking, the more we move towards full spectrum thinking.

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Full-spectrum thinking

Binary thinking, while useful for human survival, can be harmful as it limits the experiences we have, leading us to live in a disconnected and divisive world. We need more people to be engaged with each other’s diverse perspectives instead of lumping each other into preconceived categories.

The antidote to binary thinking full-spectrum thinking. Instead of making assumptions and broad generalizations, full-spectrum thinking is when we investigate the nuance and explore the gray areas.

That’s what we’re aiming for if we want to avoid binary thinking. We need to stop ourselves when we start making broad generalizations and assumptions and actively look for complexity and gray area. Slow down, learn more, and let there be more truths than the one you’re used to. Sit with complexity and uncertainty and let it motivate you to learn more instead of being overly confident about your expertise.

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Why me?

When you experience some bad experience, first thought that occurs is – why me? What did I not do right that I owe this?

Right you owe this, but not because you did something wrong. But, because it brings you a chance to transform and be a new you.

But, there is a caveat. Most of the people do not make the best out of such situations.

Life works with whatever energy you are projecting.

When you respond to these situations by question “why is it happening to me?”, you take a victim position. And if you’re projecting a victim mentality what do you think you’re going to attract? Problems.

Pn the other hand, when a challenging situation appears, if your question is “why is this happening FOR ME?”, you will respond better, with more clarity, with more perspective than someone who believes it is happening to them.

It’s not happening TO ME… it’s happening FOR ME.

It can’t be just words. You have to trust that. You have to believe that.

When you do that, you build a new narraative and a new perspective that is in lined with how you see your future self.

Your life is your own creation… because you truly do decide whatever MEANING you give each situation.

The cells in your body react to everything your mind says.

Create an empowering meaning for every situation.

That is a CHOICE and it’s always available.