Kevin Surace argues that complaining drains your mental energy, or "positive quotient," which resets each morning. His one-complaint-a-day rule forces you to count every gripe and save your single allowed complaint for what actually matters, leaving you more productive and less exhausting to be around.
Most people turn every single day into a horrific day. They get out of bed and they start with, oh, my knees hurt from yesterday's exercise. And humans complain on average of over 100 times a day, internal or external. And every complaint takes away a point from your positive quotient. You want to be at a 10? You wake up at a 5, you're at a 0 in 10 minutes. In 10 minutes. How are you going to be productive when you're down there and no one wants to be around you? So I have the one complaint a day rule. Get up and count your complaints, internal or external, for the day. You're going to burn up your one in the first second. I tell you, you're going to get out of bed. Oh, my shoulder. You've used up your one. This is just a reason that there's a way to gamify this problem, right? Because if you gamify it, you realize if you burned up your one on that, you have no more the rest of the day, it's gonna be really hard. So now you start to learn to save it up. You say, I'm going to save my one because there will be something to complain about. But it's probably at 3 o'clock, I'm going to save it. That is fascinating. It changes people's lives. And they come back to me a few weeks later and say, I couldn't do it the first day. But within X number of days, I got to one complaint a day. I now live that way. Kevin, you changed my life.
