George Kao adds two modes to his framework for when life goes wrong: the blessing of problems, where you see pain as opportunity for growth, and unconscious negativity, where you spiral into depression or anger. Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.
Hi, this is George Kao, and in one of my earlier videos, I talked about the three modes of living consciously. I talked about flow, I talked about transitions, and I talked about recovery. I'll add a link to that video in the notes of this one, but I want to add two more. I realized I didn't cover two additional modes that happen to all of us. And these two modes actually have to do with what happens when life isn't going the way you want it to. Right? Because when you're in the other three modes, flow, transition, recovery, things are going relatively well or stable, you are feeling pretty good. And so you can kind of make a more conscious decision about how to live life. But what happens when you have problems? What happens when you experience pain? Then you can, then you shift into the other two modes, which is the blessing of progress problems or unconscious negativity. Okay, there's only two ways of doing it, right? So in life, pain is inevitable, but suffering is not. We all are going to experience pain, whether it's physical pain or most of the time it's emotional pain, or I might even say mental pain. Meaning, wow, what a difficult problem to solve. When you encounter pain, do you either look at it as the blessing of problems? The blessing of problems or unconscious go into unconscious negativity? What I mean by the blessing of problems is that I believe problems are given to us in order for us to grow. Okay? Now you may or may not believe that, but you can certainly choose to see your problems as opportunities to tap into your resourcefulness, as the chance to practice your creativity rather than, oh, how come things aren't going just the way I want it to go? Right, because things don't go the way that you plan in life. You are not God. You cannot see everything. You cannot foresee the future and every single factor that is possible in life. So of course you're going to plan certain things and it's not going to work out the way you plan. That's called being a human being. So you have the choice of either being unconsciously negative about it, which is what most people do. They get depressed or angry, by the way, depression, some of it's neurochemical. So I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about getting down on ourselves because things aren't working the way we want it to, or getting down on somebody else or getting down about life in general. That's unconscious negativity, and it creates an unfortunate spiral towards more negativity. So please, please be aware and don't do that. Instead go into the other mode which I call the blessing of problems which is to look at this problem and say ah this problem is an opportunity given to me. You could even say a gift given to us to practice the muscles of our creativity and of our perseverance and various virtues that we can practice. And if you see the problem as that the blessing of problems you will then have more likely that you'll have the strength to use your creativity and to use your virtues and of course you can always ask for help, ask the universe for help, ask God for help or ask other people for help. So I hope that that's helpful. Remember there are five modes in life. There's the flow, transition and recovery which I talked about in the other video which is linked in the notes of this one. And then there are when things are not going well the blessing of problems or unconscious negativity. Make a choice, you always have one.
