Contents
Step 71: “The dangerous thing is not that the tornado arrives, but not seeing it coming”
The 88 rungs of happy people
In this chapter of “The 88 Steps of Happy People” I teach you not to expect too much from life so as not to be disappointed later
Follow my game in these two approaches.
In approach A, what life gives you has a value of 3, and what you expected it to give you (your level of expectation) is also of value 3. Question: if you expected 3 and life gives you 3, are you happy with it? that life has given you? Answer: Yes.
In approach B what life gives you has a value of 3 and what you expected it to give you has a value of 10. Are you happy in this case? Answer: No.
But nevertheless, in both cases you have received exactly the same! Why then are you happy in the first case but not in the second, even though what you have received has not changed the least? Because…
There are two ways to apply this Step. One is: do not aspire to much in life, and so you can be content with little, but this position is diametrically opposite to the one I defend both in this book and in all those I have written. Do you remember Step number 11 from ‘The 88 Steps of Success’? He talked about the importance of “get up” and why we should tattoo it on our minds. So, of course, we should not aspire to little, but to everything possible, and if we fall short, this should not hurt. This is the reason:
Why? Because, whether you have achieved the goal or not … if you have fought, you have grown. So this Step is not an invitation not to aspire to good things, but to not hope that bad things do not come (read it a couple of times). And that’s the point. When life gives you a setback, thinking that once you get over it it will not come back again will make you weak, and thinking that it is the first of many will make you strong.
A few days before writing this Step I gave a conference in the middle of which one of the attendees suffered an epileptic seizure. I always defend that a treasure hides in all filth, and one of those that this person found in his (there was more than one) was that he ended up receiving a coaching session from me that lasted almost an hour (I shrunk in such a way my heart to see her so helpless, that I was dying to do something to help her). When he came to his senses and overcame the physical problem, I saw that he still had a great mental obstacle left. What caused her the most pain was not the situation itself, but rather that she was already convinced that it had been overcome months ago and that she would no longer suffer epileptic seizures. In other words, pain does not arise when life gives you a value of three, but when you expected a value of ten. What was my message to her? “Lucia, your greatest danger does not come from what you have to go through, but from having the expectation that you will no longer have to go through it again. There will be more episodes, but nothing happens because your ability to manage them increases with each one.
When I was little my father got very frustrated every time he broke a plate. I looked at him with a smile and said: “Dad, assume that between now and your last day on Earth 117 dishes are going to break, so every time one breaks you can think:” There is one less.
@Angel
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