Kevin Surace says limit yourself to one complaint a day. Constant complaining drains mental energy and narrows your thinking, he argues, while the restriction forces you to find joy in routine tasks and opens your mind to problem-solving.
Most successful people have one habit that broke people never develop. This inventor just explained it in under 75 seconds. I live with a rule, which is the following. I want everyone to get up tomorrow morning, count the number of negatives or complaints that you have, internal or external, throughout the day. Oh, this hurts. Oh, it's raining. Oh, the tree's dead. It's going to be 100 or so, trust me. And maybe you're really good and it's only 80, but the number is going to shock you because every time you've spent energy on complaining internally or externally, you've hurt your ability to be successful. The most successful people are up out of 10. And that opens their mind. And there's science behind this too, that opens their mind to find those problems and find solutions because their mind is open and ready to accept that and be curious, right? But when you're down there in the gutter and everything's negative, you have no ability to be curious. You're just trying to dig yourself out. So count the number of negatives or complaints, internal or external, right? Then the next day, you have a goal from there going forward for the rest of your life. And that goal is you get one complaint a day, only one. I hate these kids. And that was your one. It's a way to gamify the whole thing. Because if you have that number in your mind, you're not going to be at 1 the first day. But when you hit 1, you realize that's supposed to be the last one of the day. And now all day I got to sweep the floor. But you know what? I'm going to find joy in it. I'm going to play some music while I sweep the floor, right? I mean, whatever it is, but you're going to find joy in every task because you have to, because you're limited to 1 complaint a day. So you can't complain about any of the tasks. So when you gamify it, it changes your life. It changes the people who want to be around you. It changes your ability to grow. It changes your ability to be curious, to solve problems. Just a game changer.
