Arthur C. Brooks teaches students to keep a failure list: write down what happened and how it hurt, then return after a month to note what you learned, and after three months to record a positive outcome. The practice shows how suffering becomes knowledge and growth.
Never waste your suffering. I ask my students in my happiness class to, to, to keep a failure and disappointment list. And each time something bad happens that feels like a loss, or it feels like a disappointment, or feels like a failure, you write it down and leave 2 lines blank. And on the first line, you write down, it's like, that thing 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? And then 3 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 gonna be looking back at the knowledge and growth from past negative experiences and the benefit that actually has come from those negative experiences. Never, never, never waste sacrifice. Never waste your suffering.
