Monday 17 February 2014

My Happy Project - The world isn't as bad as we think

My Happy Project: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |

For those who know me, they know that I am just a regular guy.  I have no special training or qualifications and this blog is just where I throw out my thoughts that might be of interest to you.  My my previous post I shared a TED talk by Shawn Achor talking about the happiness advantage.  I would like to start off this post by sharing 3 things that I am grateful for today as Shawn suggested.
  1. My wife for the love and support that she constantly provides to me.
  2. My children for teaching me more about life every day.
  3. My parents who I learn to appreciate more every day as I try to be a parent.
In the past week I have been trying to focus on the positive and look for the good with the purpose to realize how much good there is around us.  Today, I want share this VlogBrothers video from YouTube entitled "The Golden Gate Bridge Didn't Collapse!!" In this video Hank Green, in his style of humour, talks about our human perception of events.

Hank Green discusses his opinion why we feel the world is such a bad place and often we believe it is getting worse.  I completely agree with him on these points.  So many amazing things happen daily but as we learned from Shawn Achor, once we do something successfully we just up the conditions for success.  There are so many things that are amazing in life to train ourselves to think positively we need to narrow our view a little bit.  Hank's example of taking the 1000 people that are nearest to us we would experience 1 murder per lifetime.  However, with international news coverage we hear about many more murders across the globe causing us to over estimate chances of those negative events affecting our lives.  Hank states that our brains tend to weigh negative things two times more significant than positive things.  Since the negative makes more of an impact and since media companies like to make an impact, they look as far out as they need to to find the most sensational story.  You mix those two things together and we can understand that we are exposed to more negative news and we weight it more heavily. 

We have to celebrate the good stuff that happens to us and become more aware of the general positive that surrounds us.  The challenge is when I walk out the door tomorrow I should be happy that the snow plough cleared my street and not focus on the fact that it dumped tremendous amounts of snow at the end of my drive way.   I should celebrate the time spend at a red light as a nothing short of a miracle, that others will wait at the red light when I have my green.  The practical applications of these lessons in happiness are the most important to how we move forward.

So do you think the world is getting better or worse?  Do we even have the ability to have an impact to make the world better or are we all destined for failure and destruction?  I would like to believe that we live in a great place and we have great power and responsibility to make the world better.


My Happy Project: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |

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