Kevin Surace describes the One-Complaint Challenge, a system to break the habit of constant complaining. Most people complain about a hundred times a day without noticing. The trick is setting a limit of just one complaint daily, which forces you to choose it carefully and stop after that.
Humans love to complain, love to complain. You get out of bed, you go, oh, my legs hurt. Oh, the breakfast sucks. Oh, the tea is out. Oh, the coffee's too strong. I just go down the line, right? So I developed this rule set for me, and it works, which is tomorrow get up and count the number of internal or external complaints you have. You are going to find that's probably 100, and it's going to shock you. You can't improve that which you don't measure. So we have to measure it. Once we measure it, your new goal— and this is a gamification of your brain, okay? But your new goal is one complaint today. Now, you won't get there the next It will take some time, and that's okay. But your goal is one. Now the reason I set a goal, and it's a reasonable goal, it's not zero, it's one. The reason I set a goal is now if you get up and you go, oh boy, that knee hurts, then you realize you're three seconds into the day and you've already used up your entire allotment of complaints, and it forces you to say, ah, okay, I can't complain about that.
