The Beauty of Bittersweet: How Heartache Can Make You Whole Again

There is another way of being that exists in this world that our writers and religious traditions and wisdom traditions and artists have been talking about for centuries all over the world. And it is this bittersweet state of mind which helps us unlock our deepest creativity and our deepest love. And we need to learn how, how to do that.

Foreign welcome back everyone to the mindvalley Podcast. Our guest today is a remarkable, remarkable woman who at one point was considered one of the most influential people in the world on LinkedIn because of her ideas. Please welcome Susan Cain to Mindvalley. Now I want to give you an idea of what Susan Cain has done because her work is just so exceptional. She is a self described introvert and wrote a remarkable book called the Power of Introverts in the World that Can't Stop Talking. It's been translated into 40 language and spent eight years on the New York Times bestseller list. It was named the number one best book of the year by Fast Company magazine. How about that? Now as an introvert myself, I can tell you that Susan's work is something that all of you white and private introverts should, should be paying attention to. She also gave a TED Talk on the power of introverts and the hidden power of sad songs and rainy days, and it's been viewed 40 million times. LinkedIn named her as the top six influencer in the world, just behind Richard Branson and Melinda French Gates. And I'm so delighted to have Susan Cain with us today. Susan, welcome to the mindvalley podcast.

Thank you so much, Vishen. It is so great to be here with you.

So, just a bit of a backstory. Initially we wanted to talk about introversion, but Susan's new book really intrigued me. The book is called Bittersweet How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. And after a discussion with Susan, we felt that it would be more fun, more educational, more exciting for both of us to discuss Bittersweet. And I want to tell you why. And Susan, I'm going to invite you to share some of the key ideas from the book. And for those of you who are curious about the book, you can find it on Amazon. Bittersweet. Just type in Bittersweet Susan Cain that spelled C A I N and you'll be able to find it. So Susan, I find that every now and then I get into a period of melancholy and it's how you describe it in your book. Susan describes bittersweet as that quiet force that helps us transcend our personal and collective pain, whether from death or breakup, addiction or illness. And to me, it's a really beautiful state of mind. But when I explain it to friends, they asked me, are you okay? Recently, I was hosting a dinner, and I sent a message to one of my team members who was organizing this dinner for Mind Value authors here in Europe. And I said, hey, I'm going to be melancholy today. Just want to let you know my energy may be different from what you're used to. And her reply was, are you okay? Can I help? And I'm like, no, I'm good. I'm just saying I'm going to be melancholy. I'm letting you know my energy is going to be different. And I think I learned this from past experience. There was a time when, when I felt this, I would feel something was wrong, and I would move from melancholy and bittersweet to just sadness and then beating myself up for being sad or insecure. And you know what happened, Susan, that was really interesting for me. I watched a Walt Disney movie, the Walt Disney Pixar movie Inside Out. Remember that?

Well, I mean, not only do I remember it, but. But that was one of the foundational stories that I tell in the book Bittersweet. I want to hear your. Your experience with the movie, and then I'm going to tell you this story that I had with Pete Docter, the director who.

Yeah, yeah. So when I was. When I was watching Inside out with my kids, I was so into the movie, but I was so irritated with that sadness character, that sadness character who would come in and mess everything up. And. But me and my kids were getting frustrated. Be like, stop listening to the sadness. Stop listening to the sadness. Listen to the positive character. But then at the end of the movie, you understand why the sadness is there. And there's that. That beauty and sadness. And that movie flipped the switch in my head. And so that. That was when I started reflecting on. On. Because I'm. I've been. I used to be prone to depression. I've been periods of my life when the depression, the funk was so bad it was almost suicidal. I didn't know how to pull myself out. And that movie flipped a switch. So let's. Let's hear about your work in Bittersweet and your involvement with that movie.

Yeah. Okay. I mean, so you touched on so many things that are so core and so foundational to. To the book that I wrote and to why I wrote it in the first place. I wrote the book because I have been gripped by a mystery all my life, which is why it is that there is. There is this certain state of being. And we feel it. We often feel it when we listen to beautiful sad music. You know, like you hear Beethoven's Ode to Joy or Adele or whoever it is for you, and you feel not really sad at all. You feel a kind of sense of connection and uplift and really a sense of love that comes from this particular bittersweet state of mind in which you're kind of like acutely aware of the fact that we are all impermanent beings and the people we love best will not be here forever. And that in this world joy and sorrow are forever paired. And it's like the more you become attuned to that and the more you become aware of it, the greater access. You feel like you're having two states of. Of connection and creativity and even transcendence. And this is something I kept experiencing again and again. And yet there is no way to understand it in our culture because everything in US culture, and you could say global culture to some extent too, is about be positive, be up. And it's wonderful to be optimistic and upbeat and in a cheerful state of mind. So this is in no way a critique of that state of mind, but it is to say there is another way of being that exists in this world that our writers and religious traditions and wisdom traditions and artists have been talking about for centuries, all over the world. And it is this bittersweet state of mind which helps us unlock our deepest creativity and our deepest love. And we need to learn how to do that. Some years ago I was actually visiting Pixar because I was leading a seminar there on how to harness the talents of introverts at Pixar. And I was lucky while I was there to attending my seminar with was Pete Docter, the great director. He directed the movies up and also Inside out, the one that you're talking about, and also Soul. And he told me the story of how that movie Inside out came to be focused on that character of Sadness because originally. Well, first of all, for people who haven't seen the movie, it's basically, it's about this 11 year old girl and the movie is all about the emotions inside her mind. So it's really a movie about our emotional lives and the emotions are the characters in the movie. And as with any movie, you have to pick one or two characters as your main protagonist. And so at first he had picked the emotions of joy and fear and he made the movie. He spent like three years making this movie only to realize at the end of this three year process that the movie was A disaster, and it was going to flop. And when he realized this, he started feeling like all the successes he had had before, those were all just a mirage, that his whole career was going to flop. He was going to lose his career, he was going to lose his place at Pixar. And he descended into this great sadness, and he realized that the sadness he was having about this idea that he was going to lose his career, it was really about the loss of his beloved colleagues. Like, he realized he was going to lose them. And he said he. At that moment, it was like an epiphany. And he realized that the thing that sadness does, the reason it matters, is because it draws us together. That sadness is a kind of bonding agent. That's when he realized that sadness had to be at the center of the movie. And he knew it was going to be a tough sell with the executive team, because nobody in our culture likes sadness. Just the way you had that reaction when you first saw it, like, get sadness off the screen. But he convinced them. He convinced them to put sadness at the center of the movie. And as you say, sadness was the character that brings all the others together. And it became this huge box office and critical sensation as a result.

That's so beautiful. Imagine working in a movie for three years and then realizing that something was amiss. But, yes, that the message in that movie was incredible. And the message it was teaching kids is also so beautiful, because I never grew up learning that it was okay to be sad. That movie, in a way, changed my life. Now let's talk about the book Bittersweet. Tell us about the book. Why did you write it? What's the key idea that you're trying to get out to the world here?

The key idea, I mean, is that there is a difference. And you talked about this at the beginning. You were talking about tendencies to depression that you've had. And the key idea is that there is a difference between depression, which is truly something to be avoided and to be. To be treated. But there's a difference between that state of mind of depression, which is a kind of, you know, utter despair and hopelessness and numbness. There's a difference between that and this state of bittersweetness that my book is shining a light on, which is an incredibly generative state that leads us towards love and towards creativity, and that it's a state that we can learn how to access, that all of us know in our hearts. We're taught not to use it, but it is one of our great superpowers, one of the ideas in the book is that whatever pain you can't get rid of, make that your creative offering. And then one of the other ideas of the book is that when you tap into this state of bittersweetness, it is one of the greatest bonding agents we have. It's one of the greatest sources of love that we have.

How do you take that sadness and how do you turn that sadness into a creative offering?

Well, I mean, in the book, I look at many different artists, some of them well known and some of them just sort of creating small little acts of art, art in their daily lives. Because one of the principles is the point is not that you have to go out and become, you know, world famous artist. And now you've managed to take sadness and turn it into creativity. You can do it in very small and daily ways that will enhance your life greatly. But the point really is that when difficult things happen to us, and they will happen to all of us because we're human, that is what it is to be human. We don't want to admit that, you know, especially like you've been lucky enough to go through your life so far without anything particularly difficult happening to you. You can start to think that that's what your identity is and that's who you are, instead of realizing that in fact you are a human and therefore mortal and vulnerable and impermanent. And things will happen. Okay? So when those things happen, we kind of have two fundamental choices, and one of them is to not really acknowledge all of these things. What ends up happening is that we then take our pain and we turn it against ourselves in the form of depression or addiction or any different ways. Or we might turn it against somebody else in the form of abuse or passive aggressiveness or what have you. That's option number one. You're not acknowledging pain and you're turning it towards yourself or towards other people. But another path that we can take is to see what that pain is, to sit with it for a while and then to see it as a signpost that you wouldn't be experiencing the pain that you have that you are over. Let's say it's a bereavement or a breakup or a betrayal or whatever it is. You wouldn't be experiencing that kind of pain if it weren't pointing you in the direction of that which you love the most, that which you value the most. We see this in so many different ways. You see, after 9, 11 in the US suddenly lots of people were signing up for jobs as firefighters or teachers in the wake of the pandemic, we see lots of people signing up for medical school and for nursing school. Why do we do that? It's because one of the great superpowers of human beings is it's to take a painful event and to make meaning out of it, make creativity out of it. We can paradoxically go in the direction of that pain, but we're doing that because we're actually planting seeds. We're making seeds grow. In the book, I offer many different stories of people who have done this in lots of different, different realms of life so that you can find the one that works for you.

In your book Bittersweet, how else would you say, how do we embrace those moments when we are feeling sad? And how do we know if this sadness is bittersweetness or if the sadness could be a sign of something actually being wrong?

Right. I mean, one of the questions you can ask yourself is like, do you feel that you can't. You can't extricate yourself from it? A depressive sadness is a feeling of being stuck, a feeling of being mired. You will not be able to feel creative when you're in a true depressive state, as opposed to when you're in more of a bittersweet and melancholic state. You see the cracks. You see them clearly. You see the impermanence. You see it clearly, and you also see great joy and beauty along with it. I mean, if you think of bittersweetness, the definition of it is the idea that joy and sorrow are forever paired. You're seeing both at all times, and you can access both states at all times. I say at all times. I mean, of course, there are going to be some states where you're all. It's like more all joy or all sorrow, but a feeling that you're toggling back and forth between them.

So on your website, susancain.net, there is a bittersweet quiz, right? And one of the questions you ask in the quiz is, do you know what C.S. lewis means when he speaks about the sharp, bitter stab of longing? I love that question. The sharp, bitter stab of longing. I get that. But I wonder. But then you also ask questions such as, are you moved more by poetry than by sports? And I wonder, is this.

Or do you see the poetry in sports? I just want to add that for.

Our sports lovers, is this bittersweetness something that everybody experiences in the same way, or is this a characteristic? Is there a characteristic of certain human beings that make more prone to bittersweetness yeah.

So this is a very good question, what we found. I developed this bittersweet quiz together with the psychologist David Yadin at Johns Hopkins and Scott Barry Kaufman. And we did all these studies around the quiz. So, first of all, the quiz asks you questions like some of the ones you said, and also questions like, do you draw comfort or inspiration from a rainy day? Do you know, that feeling of sad music as a kind of form of uplift? Do you know, do you feel especially drawn to art, music and nature? There's a whole bunch of questions. You can take the quiz. Here's what we found. For some people who score high on this quiz, they also score high on measures of a trait known as high sensitivity, which was a trait discovered by the psychologist Elaine Aaron. And a highly sensitive person is somebody who reacts more intensely to everything about life. So if there are super bright lights in a room or really loud noise or a lot of emotional discomfort in a room, a highly sensitive person picks up on that super intensely. And it probably bothers them more than it bothers the average person. A highly sensitive person is also more reactive to the joys and the beauties. So like that gorgeous sunset, they're going to feel it that much more deeply. So highly sensitive people tend to score high on this measure of bittersweetness. But there are also a bunch of people who come to bittersweetness not through this inborn temperament, but just through life experience. After you've been through enough of life's trials and triumphs and you see how they all fit together, that. That can predispose you to this bittersweet state of mind as well.

So I just did the quiz. I got a score of 5.6, and it says that if you score between 0 and 3.8, you tend towards the sanguine, cheerfully optimistic. If you score between 3.9 and 5.7, you tend to move between sanguine and bittersweet states to experience both. And above 5.8, you're a true connoisseur of bittersweetness. The place where light and dark.

And what did you say your score was? You were right in the middle. Was it? Yeah. Yeah. So you're like right on the cusp of a deep bittersweet, but more in the middle. I see somebody's asking for a link to the website. So It's Susan, Susan cain.net, you can find the quiz there. Yeah. And what I do think is important for people to understand this idea of bittersweetness. It's power, just like Other powers. So I was talking with a friend of mine, and she took the quiz and she literally scored a zero on it. So she has no bittersweetness in her at all. She is a very powerful and wonderful person in a different way. And one of the great lessons I believe we take from our movies, from our mythology, from our literature, and is that there are many different kinds of powers on offer in this world, right? And, you know, there's the power of the lightsaber. There's the power of. Of. Of the wizard spells. There's the power of incredible strength. There are many different kinds of powers. And the trick in this life is to use the powers that are granted to us and to refine and to hone those powers. And there are some people for which this state of bittersweetness is one of our greatest powers. We're living in a culture that doesn't teach us this. And that's where this book comes in. It's like, how do you use that power? If this state of bittersweetness calls to you, how do you use it?

For people who score highly on this quiz who have the tendency towards bittersweetness, what is that superpower? How should they maybe perceive or operate in the world differently, taking advantage of this characteristic that they have?

Yeah. Okay. So we found that people who score high on the quiz also score high on measures of being receptive to awe. States of awe, states of wonder, spirituality, and also creativity. So if you are this person, if this bittersweet way speaks to you, you probably also have easy access to these states of awe, wonder, creativity, spirituality. And you should use them, and you should lean into them, and you should find them everywhere you go. Like during your trip to the Grand Canyon, you get to experience awe. Or when you go to your place of religious worship, that's when you experience spirituality instead of seeing the portals and the gateways to these states of mind as existing everywhere around us and inviting them into our lives on a day by day, minute by minute basis. So just for example, like, I'll go to Rumi again, the poet both love. So Rumi has this amazing poem where he talks about how we wake up in the. He says we wake up in the morning empty and frightened. And then he says, instead of. I don't know the exact words at my fingertips, but he's basically saying, instead of going straight to our study and starting work, he says, reach for the musical instrument. And then these are the exact words. He says, let the beauty we love be what we do. Let the beauty we love be what we do. So for a bittersweet person or for somebody who wants to access that state more often, you should be immersing yourself in beauty proactively, as much as you possibly can. It should be like a foundational element of your life. And there's a lot of ways to do this. I share in the book that for me, as I was writing this book, I started following art accounts all over social media so that my social feed now is full of art. That's what I get. And this was actually at first my social feed was full of doom scrolling and it was really depressing me and making me anxious when I would wake up in the morning and open my phone. But now I open it and it's full of art. And then I started every morning sharing on my social media favorite pieces of art and taking the time to pair them with favorite poetry or quotes or whatever. And that attracted this community of kindred spirits who are oriented the same way. And so it became this great communal, proactive immersion in beauty as the way we started our day.

Oh, I love that. And I see what you're saying. It's so interesting. When you're bittersweet, I find it fascinating that you're more prone to moments of awe, prone to those beautiful moments of aliveness. I've never thought about it that way and I've never thought that there were certain people who are more prone to that. This makes me. This makes me think of many of my close friends and to see them as slightly different. I mean we all know introverts, extroverts, right? People get that, they self label on that. And you wrote one of the definitive books on that concept. Quiet. The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. As I'm talking to you, I'm beginning to see that there is this other. Delineate the type of human being that is prone to bittersweetness or not prone to bittersweetness. Are there words for these personality types.

In mainstream psychology? No. That's why I wrote the book actually, because it literally doesn't. Yeah, it literally does not exist. If you put the word melancholy into standard psychological database, you just call up a whole bunch of articles about depression. That's all you've got. And yet this has existed for 2000 years. All across the world you see people talking about this and wondering about it. Two thousand years ago, Aristotle asked the question, why is it that so many of the great poets, philosophers and politicians seem to have melancholic personalities that's what he asked. And people have been talking about this for, you know, for centuries. It's also like it's at the heart of our religious and particularly mystical traditions, the idea that the fundamental state of being human is to feel a sense of, like this, this acute, joyful, yet bittersweet longing for a more perfect and beautiful world than the one in which we find ourselves. You can express this as a longing for God, a longing for the perfect union, a longing for the perfect love. And this gets expressed again and again. The longing for the Garden of Eden, the longing for Mecca, the longing for the beloved of the soul, the longing for somewhere over the rainbow. This is fundamental to human nature, and it's one of the best and most generative aspects of ourselves.

Beautiful, Susan. Thank you so much for this exploration of this idea. For those of you who want to check out Susan's books, the books are called Bittersweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. And her second book, her earlier book that was in New York Times for eight years, is the Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. So definitely go check that out. The easiest place to find these is on Susan cain.nets u s a n c a I n.net thank you, Susan. So with that, we wrap up this podcast. I'll see you guys on the next mindvalley podcast.