2024.2.14 | #49

Happy Reality Day! Here is your weekly dose of reality to help you live 1% happier↓

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Bad day, huh?

I believe in luck.

Sometimes everything goes smoothly throughout the day, and sometimes everything goes bad throughout the day.

For me, today is a bad day.

(If my unfortunate experience can bring you joy for a minute, this email is worth it 🙂

This newsletter that should have been sent out yesterday was not sent out because there were too many things going on yesterday, so I thought about sending it out the first thing this morning.

BUT, just when I was about to start writing, a friend called me, and I instantly had a bad feeling.

She wants to pay the natural gas bill, but because she is over 60 years old and cannot ride a bike, and there is no taxi around, so she asked me to take her to the place.

So I went with her.

After a long ride, she realized that we were going the wrong way because she pointed the wrong way.

And because we took a long detour, the Ebike ran out of power halfway through, so we went looking for a place to charge.

After finally charging it, I went on to deal with the natural gas thing.

After that, I came back to pick up the Ebike and then rode back to the house. I thought I could finally go to Starbucks and start writing my newsletter.

BUT I couldn’t find any shared Ebikes. So I had to walk there in another 40 minutes.

OK, there are bad things happend so far as of noon today, I don’t know what else is waiting for me in the corner in the afternoon.

So, what should you do when you wake up and find that nothing you did today went well?

If it were the old me, I would have been irritated and angry all morning. I felt like I was wasting my time doing things I didn’t want to do. I would be so annoyed!

But today I have been very peaceful. why? Because this is what I did, maybe you can copy and try:

“3 steps to face bad luck”

1. Decision. I asked myself: “Am I doing this?” The answer is yes because there is no other way, it is the only choice for me to take her. This is to analyze the problem and find the best solution first.
2. Acceptance. I told myself: Since I have chosen to do it, so I just accept it. I will allocate time to finish this thing first this morning, then do other things.
3. Lesson. Afterwards, I summarized the lessons I learned this time, including the things I didn’t do well in the process. For example, I should have asked about the location at the beginning, and I would have used the map to navigate. And in the long run, how should I prevent this kind of thing from happening again in the future? For example, if I teach her to ride a bike, I won’t need to do this again in the future.

This is my 3-step method for dealing with bad luck. The essence of this method is just one word: acceptance.

Acceptance is adjusting expectations based on reality.

I planned to finish writing my newsletter in the morning, but I was interrupted by these unexpected things I didn’t want to do. Whether I can face this situation happily depends on whether I can adjust my expectations based on reality.

If you can’t adjust, you will always be in pain. If you adjust, you will be content with the situation.

After all, happiness = reality – expectation.

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Do you find this issue of Reality helpful? Leave a reply to this email, I check every reply in my inbox.

Until next week,

Ted Wild

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