A short personal-reflection video by Brian Johnson in which he reframes a minor household annoyance—his son Emerson leaving the toilet paper on the bathroom floor—as an opportunity to practice gratitude and cherish fleeting moments of childhood. He encourages viewers to reframe daily triggers from annoyance to appreciation and to notice life’s preciousness.
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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. In our last one we talked about our rooster Happy. He's still hanging in there. And today I want to continue the theme we explored in that +1 and see if we can get better at using the things that currently trigger us to feel annoyed to instead trigger us to feel grateful. Here's an example from the Johnson house to help you think of things you might want to reframe in your house. So my son Emerson is a high energy kid. And note I was going to say my little guy, Emerson, but he's almost 10 as I type this and he's no longer little, he's up to here. It's shocking to see the speed with which he's growing. And as we've joked before, when he wakes up, he kind of runs out of the room like Kramer from Seinfeld. All energy, all the time. It's fantastic. Except of course, when it's not. So here's a mundane example. For some strange reason, when Emerson uses the toilet paper in the bathroom, he often rips it off the little horizontal bar it rests on and the roll of toilet paper winds up unraveled and strewn across the bathroom floor. Lol. Now, I'm a parent and a teacher, so of course we've had some conquering toilet paper 101 classes on how to gently roll the toilet paper and gently rip the amount you think you need from the roll while ensuring it stays in place at the end of the job. Ten big ideas, folks. And that lesson just hasn't stuck. So after Emerson's done his thing, that toilet paper roll often winds up strewn across the bathroom floor and I can choose to use that toilet paper everywhere again as either a trigger for my annoyance and yet another lecture on the mechanics of toilet paper, or I can use that same trigger as an opportunity to appreciate the fact that one day, way too soon, that toilet paper roll is going to be perfectly and permanently affixed to its resting place, never to see the floor again. And I got tears in my eyes typing that and saying that I'm not ready for that day yet. I want to fully enjoy the incredible enthusiasm of my not so little boy who's becoming a wonderfully enthusiastic young man for as long as I can, knowing that like all the other wonderful things in my life, it's not going to last forever. And that's today's plus one. You got a trigger? Seriously? Pause. Think of at least one little thing a loved one does that. If we actually practiced our philosophy with a little more rigor could easily be alchemized from annoying to charming. You got it. Awesome. Let's remember the fact that life is preciously short, and let's use everything we can as a reminder of just how precious it is. Minus one to plus one all day, every day, especially today.
