Arthur C. Brooks teaches students to keep a failure journal: write down each setback, leave blank lines, then revisit after one month to note what you learned and after three months to record any positive outcomes. The practice turns suffering into knowledge by forcing you to extract value from every setback.
Never waste your suffering. I ask my students in my class, in my happiness class, to keep a failure and disappointment list. Each time something bad happens that feels like a loss or it feels like a disappointment or feels like a failure, which is a lot. I mean, this happens to us pretty frequently. You write it down and leave two lines blank. And on the first line you write down, it's like, that thing really bothered me. It really bothered me. And then a month later, you come back to the first line that you left blank under it and write down, what did you learn? What did you learn about that? What did you learn from that experience? And then three months later, you come back to the second line and write down a good thing that happened because of that loss. And you're filling in the notebook, and by the time you're going to a new thing that's really bugging you, really bothering you, you start to look forward to it, because you're going to be looking back at the knowledge and growth from past negative experiences and the benefit that actually has come from those negative experiences. While never, never, never waste sacrifice, never waste your suffering.
