Scott H Young

Note from Scott: Leo Babauta, head writer of Zen Habits, has offered to provide a guest post while I’m recovering.  Check out Zen Habits for more great articles like this one.  Or read the other popular articles he’s written for this website, Do Less to Be More Productive and 20 Procrastination Hacks.

Photo courtesy of Lin_Pernille

I was talking to two friends recently, both of whom have life issues to tackle (like any of us don’t!). The first friend kept telling me how bad everything is, and especially how bad he is at everything. The second friend would tell me her problem, but also talk about how she was sure she could do it, and pointed to her past successes.

The difference between these two friends is night and day, and it revolves around their attitude.

The first friend has a negative attitude and a negative self-image, and will have a much harder time solving his issues. The second friend has a positive attitude, sees the positive in everything, and has a very positive self-image, and I have no doubt she’ll succeed.

Today we’ll take a look at why a positive attitude can be the key difference in whatever you do, and how to develop a more positive attitude to ensure the greatest likelihood of success.

Why a Positive Attitude is So Darn Important

Those who don’t have a positive attitude don’t realize the incredible difference that it can make. They roll their eyes, very often, and think that “the power of positive thinking” is just a bunch of gibberish. I know, because I was one of them.

But then I started running, and the importance of positive thinking soon became clear to me. On days when I gave in to negative thoughts, and told myself that I wasn’t having any fun, and told myself that I wanted to quit … those were the days when I would give up early instead of completing a run, and when running would be pure torture. However, on the days when I turned those negative thoughts on their head, and saw the positive aspects of running, and didn’t allow negative thoughts to flourish … those are the days when I’d have a great run, full of joy, never giving up.

Run after run, the importance of positive thinking was pounded into me, until it became a part of me.

Positive thinking and a positive attitude (there’s a subtle difference, but they’re inextricably linked in my mind) are not just some “success coach” gibberish that you read about in books. They’re the tools you need to do anything in life, to change your life, to even enjoy life to its fullest.

It changes how you interact with people, and that in itself is huge. If people perceive you as a negative person, they tend to get tired of dealing with you after awhile. But if you’re a positive person, you come off in a more positive light, and you’re a joy to talk to and work with and be with.

It will determine whether you reach your goals or not. Like I said with running, thinking negative thoughts means you’re more likely to give up. But if you use positive thinking, you won’t quit, and will do the things required to make something happen.

But I Can’t Change My Thinking!

I hear this from many people who believe that they are the way they are, and there’s no way to change that. However, the statement “I can’t change my thinking” is a great example of negative thinking. If you think you can’t do it, you won’t. If you think you can, you will — and I have, and so have many others.

It starts with an awareness of your thinking. You can’t change something if you’re not aware of it. So start simply by monitoring your thoughts — and decide whether those thoughts are negative or positive. You can often tell by also monitoring the feelings inside you, and whether those feelings are negative or positive. For example, when I start thinking thoughts like, “I don’t wanna do this anymore — it’s too hard!” I also start dreading the activity and feeling bad about it. But when I change that thought to, “I can do this! I’ve done it before! And running can be lots of fun.” … then I start to enjoy the running more, and I can lift my spirits up just by changing my thinking.

Once you’re more aware of your thoughts, try changing them. It’s simply a matter of stopping a negative thought, and replacing it with a more positive thought. Repeating a mantra works well (”I can do this!”, for example) — if you repeat it enough, you start to believe it, and it affects everything you do.

I’m not saying it’s easy. It takes practice, like anything else. You won’t be good at it at first. But take it in small steps, and you can do it. What follows are some way to practice and get better at positive thinking.

Practices to Develop a Positive Attitude

Each of these practices are just a variation of positive thinking and a positive attitude, but from slightly different angles. They give you an opportunity to practice your skills throughout the day — and the more you practice, the better you’ll get, and the more benefits you’ll see.

1. Squash negative thoughts. After I learned to monitor my positive and negative thoughts, I started to envision a negative thought as a bug … and then I’d squash it! “I can’t do this!” SQUASH! Then I’d replace that negative thought with a positive one: “I CAN do this!”
2. Mantras. Anticipate your difficult situations and think of a positive mantra for that situation. Then, when things get tough, repeat the mantra over and over. For example, when I want to develop patience and learn to be in the moment, I just repeat advice from Thich Nhat Hanh: “Smile, breathe and go slowly.” It works!
3. See the good in any situation. You’ve heard the phrase, “Every cloud has a silver lining” … and that’s pretty true. Try to see the positive side to any situation, and you’ll enjoy it more, and you’ll feel better. Even tough situations have good sides: When something is difficult, see it as a challenge, as a way to learn and grow and get better and stronger. When there is a loss, see it as a reminder of what is important to you, of a way to cherish what has been lost, as a way to move on to something new, as a way to learn and grow.
4. Enjoy small pleasures. Every activity has small things that can be pleasurable if you pay attention to them and learn to enjoy them. A difficult day at the office can also be a time for you and others to come together — enjoy those moments with others. Running can be fun for its physical pleasure, for the beauty of the nature around you, for the peaceful time of meditation. Cleaning house can also be a time for meditation, and the pleasure of a clean room or laundered bedsheets cannot be overstated. Notice the small things and take pleasure in them, and any activity can be positive.
5. See the good in yourself. This is very important, because if you are negative about yourself, that affects whether you believe you can do something. If you think you’re an undisciplined person, you’ll have sloppy habits. If you think you’re lazy, you won’t work hard. If you think you’re dumb, you won’t try to learn. Instead, think positive thoughts about yourself. Try to see your strengths, see the good things you’ve done, see the silver lining in anything about yourself.
6. See the good in others. Similarly, every person has good in them — and if you look for their strengths and the good things they’ve done, you will be more positive in dealing with other people. This will result in people treating you better, and you’ll feel better as well.
7. Positive imaging. This is a tried-and-true method that has been tested on athletes — and has worked well for all kinds of non-athletes too. Visualize your success, or a positive image of yourself or any situation or activity. Visualize it in great detail, and allow yourself to feel positive things about this image. Then make the image come true.
8. Anticipate fun. Go into a situation or activity thinking it’ll be horrible, and it will be. Instead, go into that situation or activity thinking that you’ll have fun, that it’ll be a new challenge, that you’ll learn and grow from it … and it will be much more likely to be true.

Read more from Leo Babauta at his blog, Zen Habits.

Note from Scott:  Cal Newport, MIT graduate student, author of two books and blogger at Study Hacks has offered to help me out during the recovery from my illness by writing a guest post.  You can check out his fantastic blog at: http://www.calnewport.com/blog/ or read his other popular guest post on this website, The Art of the Finish.

Busy Memories

In terms of sheer volume of work, the two busiest periods from my recent past include the writing of my second book and the writing of my masters thesis. These occurred one right after another, and both intersected with a full graduate student course and research load. Here’s what’s interesting. These were not the most stressful periods in recent memory. That honor probably goes to last spring, a semester in which I wasn’t doing much research, and was definitely not writing a book or a masters thesis, but was instead taking one course and TA’ing another.

The reason this observations proves interesting is that if you add up the number of hours per week spent working, both my book and thesis swamp the recent spring term. Why, then, was the latter experience more stressful? What can this teach us about the sources of stress? And, most importantly, how can we use this knowledge to our advantage?

These are the questions I tackle in this article…

Schedule Footprints and Deadline Counts

From my experience, there are two metrics that prove particularly useful when analyzing your work. The first is the schedule footprint. This captures the quantity of hours spent working on a particular set of activities over a given period of time. The second metric is the deadline count. As its name implies, this counts the number of work deadlines – times when specific things had to be done – over the same period of time.

The Footprint Fallacy

A common mistake made by people worried about stress is to put too much emphasis on the schedule footprint. They reason that the more hours they work the more stress they’ll experience. This train of logic  leads to the conclusion that a semester spent writing a book or a masters thesis should be much more stressful then the semester with just one course and a TA gig.

The intuition is sound, but as I noted, the conclusion is wrong.

The reason, it turns out, that my spring term was more stressful was because it contained a large number of deadlines. Being a teaching assistant involves a constant flow of little things that have to get done right away – problem set problems need to be graded, students updated, slides posted, graders organized, papers sorted and handed back. The same was true of my other course: there were constant reading assignments that needed to be finished and presentations to be started and paper drafts to be handed in. Writing a book or a masters thesis, by comparison, has relatively few deadlines. Indeed, each has just one main deadline: hand it in. Even though these latter examples had a big schedule footprint, because their deadline count was low, I found them much less stressful.

Deadline Collisions

To understand this observation, let’s dive deeper, and ask: What really makes you stressed? If you think about it, you’re unlikely to simply answer “I have lots to do.” Upon reflection, you’ll probably key in on those moments when several things (potentially small) fell due at the same time; moments that spark a feeling of “I can’t get this all done in time!” These are the moments that trigger the hormonal response that we call stress.

The math is simple: the more deadlines you have, the more likely you are going to encounter these stress-inducing collisions. Therefore, the higher your deadline count, the higher your stress. Big schedule footprints, in the absence of large deadline counts, are much easier to manage.

Taking Advantage of this Reality

This sophisticated understanding of stress highlights an inefficiency in the system—a way to increase your success without a major increase in your stress. In particular, it makes a case for the following approach: focus on getting really good on a small number of things. This goal requires a large schedule footprint. If you’re becoming a world class expert in your field you have to spend a lot of time. But this time, like writing a book, or crafting a masters thesis, comes free of a large number of intermediate deadlines. To use our terminology: the schedule footprint is large but the deadline count is low.

Now compare this to the other approach of doing lot’s of things, the proverbial “keep many options open,” “say yes to everything because you never know when the favor will be returned,” strategy for handling work. This generates a huge deadline count, which, in turn, generates a large amount of stress. The kicker is that people who become world class in a small number of things are just as successful, if not much more successful, than those who do a huge number of different activities.

In other words, success-levels being equal, it stands: the experts are happier than the polymaths.

An Important Caveat

This does not mean, of course, that you should become single-tracked in your life; unable to explore or expand beyond one or two interests. Keep this in mind: activities that don’t generate hard deadlines don’t add to your stress. So if you want to take up Frisbee golf or start a band, go ahead; these don’t really add to your deadline count. They’re hobbies. You control how much time you put in. So explore. Meet people. Have fun.

This also does not mean that you can never change course. Most interesting people master many different fields over a long, fulfilling lifetime. The key, however, is to keep this more or less a serial endeavor—one pursuit after another, not all jumbled together.

Placed on the level of practical advice, this reality suggest that at work, or at school, be wary about tacking on one more committee, or joining one more club, as the benefit you’ll gain might not be worth the extra stress. Furthermore, this same volume of benefit can be replicated, if not surpassed, by assigning that extra time to an existing, long-term pursuit.

This is just an insight; use as you see fit. But it’s certainly an interesting exercise to take a good hard look at your schedule, and ask where you could reduce your deadline count while expanding your schedule footprint. For someone with outsize aspirations, these insights can be the difference between being successful and happy, and being successful with a particularly nasty ulcer.