What I’ve learned since moving to D.C. (some of which should be obvious): 0051

2501.  Even the way we describe seemingly straightforward tasks can make a difference in how people perform;

2502.  What we expect from people (and from ourselves) manifests itself in the words we use, and those words can have a powerful effect on end results;

2503.  The Pygmalion Effect: when our belief in another person’s potential brings that potential to life;

2504.  The expectations we have about our children, coworkers, spouses—whether or not they are ever voiced—can make that expectation a reality;

2505.  Theory X holds that people work because you pay them, and that if you don’t watch them they will stop working.  Theory Y holds the opposite: that people work for intrinsic motives, that they work harder and better when not being ordered around, and that they do it for the satisfaction they receive from good work.  Managers who believe Theory X turn out to have workers who need constant supervision, while managers who hold to Theory Y have employees who work for the love of the job.  Turns out that no matter what their motivations might have been before working for these managers, employees typically become the kind of worker their manager expects them to be;

2506.  While it’s important to shift our fulcrum to a more positive mindset, we don’t want to shift it too far—in other words, we have to be careful not to have unrealistic expectations about our potential;

2507.  We want to push the limits of possibility as far as they can go, not limit them in the way too many discouraging bosses, parents, teachers, or media stories tell us they should be limited;

2508.  As science has shown, when we believe we can do more and achieve more (or when others believe it for us), that is often the precise reason we do achieve more;

2509.  Stop thinking of the world as fixed when reality is, in truth, relative;

2510.  In the work world, as in our personal lives, we are often rewarded for noticing the problems that need solving, the stresses that need managing, and the injustices that need righting.  The problem is that if we get stuck in only that pattern, always looking for and picking up on the negative, even a paradise can become a hell;

2511.  The better we get at scanning for the negative, the more we miss out on the positive—those things in life that bring us greater happiness, and in turn fuel our success;

2512.  Constantly scanning the world for the negative comes with a great cost.  It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals;

2513.  Lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to suffer from major depressive disorder than the rest of the employed population;

2514.  Trained to be on the lookout for the flaws in every argument, the holes in every case, lawyers start to overestimate the significance and permanence of the problems they encounter, the fastest route to depression and anxiety—which in turn interferes with their ability to do their job;

2515.  Scientists estimate that we remember only one of every 100 pieces of information we receive; the rest effectively gets filtered out.  If we have programmed our brain’s filter to delete the positive, that data will cease to exist for us;

2516.  “Inattentional blindness” is our frequent inability to see what is often right in front of us if we’re not focusing directly on it.  This aspect of human biology means that we can miss an astoundingly large number of things that might be considered “obvious;”

2517.  Repeated studies have shown that two people can view the same situation and actually see different things, depending on what they are expecting to see.  It’s not just that they come away with different interpretations of the same event, but that they have actually seen different things in their visual field;

2518.  When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism;

2519.  The more you pick up on the positive around you, the better you’ll feel;

2520.  The more opportunities for positivity we see, the more grateful we become;

2521.  Psychologist Robert Emmons, who has spent nearly his entire career studying gratitude, has found that few things in life are as integral to our well-being;

2522.  Consistently grateful people are more energetic, emotionally intelligent, forgiving, and less likely to be depressed, anxious, or lonely;

2523.  Gratitude has proven to be a significant cause of positive outcomes.  When researchers pick random volunteers and train them to be more grateful over a period of a few weeks, they become happier and more optimistic, feel more socially connected, enjoy better quality sleep, and even experience fewer headaches than control groups;

2524.  The more your brain picks up on the positive, the more you’ll expect this trend to continue, and so the more optimistic you’ll be;

2525.  Studies have shown that optimists set more goals (and more difficult goals) than pessimists, and put more effect into attaining those goals, stay more engaged in the face of difficulty, and rise above obstacles more easily;

2526.  Optimists also cope better in high stress situations and are better able to maintain high levels of well-being during times of hardship;

2527.  It turns out that there is no such thing—in a scientific sense, at least—as luck.  The only difference (and it is a big one) is whether or not people think that they are lucky—in essence, whether they expect good or bad things to happen to them;

2528.  Sixty-nine percent of high school and college students report that their career decisions depended on chance encounters.  The difference between people who capitalize on these chances and those who watch them pass by (or miss them entirely) is all a matter of focus.  When someone is stuck in a Negative Tetris Effect, his brain is quite literally incapable of seeing these opportunities.  But armed with positivity, the brain stays open to possibility;

2529.  Priming yourself to expect a favorable outcome actually encodes your brain to recognize the outcome when it does in fact arise;

2530.  Imagine a typical paper-pushing office.  The objective reality of the physical place will always be the same: walls, carpet, stapler, computer.  But, as with everything else, how we see that space is up to us.  Some people will view the environment as constricting, confining, and depressing; others will see it as energizing and empowering.  In other words, to some, it’s an office; to others a prison cell;

2531.  Training your brain to notice more opportunities takes practice focusing on the positive.  The best way to kick-start this is to start making a daily list of the good things in your job, your career, and your life;

2532.  When you write down a list of “three good things” that happened that day, your brain will be forced to scan the last 24 hours for potential positives—things that brought small or large laughs, feelings of accomplishment at work, a strengthened connection with family, a glimmer of hope for the future.  In just five minutes a day, this trains the brain to become more skilled at noticing and focusing on possibilities for personal and professional growth, and seizing opportunities to act on them.  At the same time, because we can only focus on so much at once, our brains push out those small annoyances and frustrations that used to loom large into the background, even out of our visual field entirely;

2533.  One study found that participants who wrote down three good things each day for a week were happier and less depressed at the one-month, three-month, and six-month follow-ups.  Even after stopping the exercise, they remained significantly happier and showed higher levels of optimism;

2534.  The items you write down each day don’t need to be profound or complicated, only specific;

2535.  A variation on the Three Good Things exercise is to write a short journal entry about a positive experience;

2536.  In one experiment, researchers Chad Burton and Laura King, instructed people to write about a positive experience for 20 minutes three times a week and then compared them to a control group who wrote about neutral topics.  Not only did the first group experience larger spikes in happiness, but three months later they even had fewer symptoms of illness;

2537.  The best way to ensure follow-through on a desired activity is to make it a habit;

2538.  Looking at the world through a lens that completely filters out all negatives comes with its own problems.  That’s why I like to offer a slightly revised version of the metaphor: rose-tinted glasses.  As the name implies, rose-tinted glasses let the really major problems into our field of vision, while still keeping our focus largely on the positive;

2539.  The key is not to completely shut out all the bad, all the time, but to have a reasonable, realistic, healthy sense of optimism.  The ideal mindset isn’t heedless of risk, but it does give priority to the good.  Not just because that makes us happier but because that is precisely what creates more good;

2540.  Focusing on the good isn’t just about overcoming our inner grump to see the glass half full.  It’s about opening our minds to the ideas and opportunities that will help us be more productive, effective, and successful at work and in life;

2541.  The most successful decision come when we are thinking clearly and creatively enough to recognize all the paths available to us, and accurately predict where that path will lead.  The problem is that when we are stressed or in crisis, many people miss the most important path of all: the path up;

2542.  On every mental map after crisis or adversity, there are three mental paths.  One that keeps circling around where you currently are (i.e., the negative event creates no change; you end where you start).  Another mental path leads you toward further negative consequences (i.e., you are far worse off after the negative event; this path is why we are afraid of conflict and challenge).  And one, which I call the Third Path, that leads us from failure or setback to a place where we are even stronger and more capable than before the fall;

2543.  In a crisis, economic or otherwise, we tend to form incomplete mental maps, and ironically the path we have trouble seeing is often the most positive, productive one.  In fact, when we feel helpless and hopeless, we stop believing such a path even exits—so we don’t even bother to look for it.  But this is the very path we should be looking for;

2544.  Study after study shows that if we are able to conceive of a failure as an opportunity for growth, we are all the more likely to experience that growth.  Conversely, if we conceive of a fall as the worst thing in the world, it becomes just that;

2545.  We are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our setbacks, our history, our mistakes, or even staggering defeats along the way.  We are freed by our choices;

2546.  By scanning our mental map for positive opportunities, and by rejecting the belief that every down in life leads us only further downward, we give ourselves the greatest power possible: the ability to move up not despite the setbacks, but because of them;

2547.  Great suffering or trauma can actually lead to great positive change across a wide range of experiences.  After trauma, people also report enhanced personal strength and self-confidence, as well as a heightened appreciation for, and a greater intimacy in, their social relationships.  Of course, this isn’t true for everybody.  There are a number of mechanisms involved, but not surprisingly, mindset takes center stage;

2548.  The strategies that most often lead to Adversarial Growth include positive reinterpretation of the situation or event, optimism, acceptance, and coping mechanisms that include focusing on the problem head-on (rather than trying to avoid or deny it);

2549.  It appears that it is not the type of event per se that influences posttraumatic growth, but rather the subjective experience of the event.  In other words, the people who can most successfully get themselves up off the mat are those who define themselves not by what has happened to them, but by what they can make out of what has happened.  These are the people who actually use adversity to find the path forward;

2550.  Every setback comes some opportunity for growth that we can teach ourselves to see and take advantage of;