Dean Graziosi teaches his kids to list four possible solutions whenever a problem comes up, arguing that how fast you move from disappointment to fixing it determines how long you suffer. He started this with his seven- and nine-year-old six months ago.
Seven and nine years old.
About six months ago.
You know, I started this thing. I talk about my kids a lot. If you guys ever watch my weekly Wisdoms. The greatest gift in my life is my kiddos. And I learned so much from them. They're seven and nine. I gotta break it down. So simple for them to get it that it teaches me every time I try to give them a lesson or teach them. But literally, with my kids, I started this about six months ago. And I'm not saying you guys are kids, but I do this now myself, even though I made it up on the fly with my kids. But when something comes up and something goes wrong, I literally say, hey, let's grab a piece of paper. And I'm like, give me four things that could probably solve this. I have baseball. I have this at the same time, and I forgot my homework. How do we solve it? How do we solve it? I'm just trying to get them in this rhythm of understanding that the quickest way to fix this is to focus on the solutions. And not only do solutions help, because you actually have a solution. It puts your mind in a different frame. You get to think where you could go, what you could learn from it, how you could solve this. And if you can make this automatic thinking, it's really this and this, you can. We all suffer on a certain level, right? We all suffer things. We suffer with work. We suffer if the relationship isn't bad. We suffer if somebody didn't invite us someplace. We suffer if we felt left out. We suffer if our kids are hurting. Yeah, we're all gonna have that. But you could shorten that distance when you're disappointed or when you fail, the quicker you get to focusing on how to fix it is the length of your suffering. How many people do we know that had a really bad relationship and suffered for years focusing on what went wrong, didn't get involved in the new relationship, had heartache, had pain. Finally, one day they got over it and said, I'm gonna do something about it. I'm gonna go back to the gym. I'm gonna start dating. I'm gonna go to match.com. it's like you can decide how long that suffering is. There's no timeline. You don't. You know, sometimes we wear suffering and our stress and our anxiety. We wear it as a badge of honor. Because sometimes it does help drive you to another level, doesn't it? And then that's kind of a success trap. Like, I need to worry and stress and suffer to motivate. No, you really don't need to. You don't need to. I went years thinking you had to. You don't. You don't focus on a solution. Let someone else suffer. You don't need to.
