Probably many have come across it on such days, which look gray, heavy and boring. On such a day, nothing (really absolutely nothing) good and positive has happened.
And if we ask ourselves at such a time, is there really nothing? And if you really feel that nothing has been done during the day, what could be done to save it and turn it into a positive one?
In order to help myself and others answer these questions, in November 2012 I started a personal experiment that I called "365 positive days".
I decided that every day I would write down the most positive thing that happened to me that day and I would do it for exactly one year - 365 days. I committed to writing something for each day, meaning if I missed one day, I would still have to account for the missed days later.
What is a "positive event"? It's any event that made the day even a little bit better. The project took a little longer than I planned - 385 days. I finished it in 2013. in November and now I am sharing my experience.
Daily writing
It was necessary to start writing every day in order to mark every positive thing that happened and by no means put off writing even for a couple of days.
Well, can you now remember what happened three days ago? If so, your memory is three times better than mine, or something really positive happened that day. It really happened that when I was lazy or forgot to write in the evening, the events of the last few days got confused in my head and I had to think carefully about which event belongs to which day.
As a result, even when I went on a trip, a hike in nature - anywhere - I had a notebook with me, in which I would mark the most positive event of the day, which I would later transcribe into a notebook.
Eventually, this habit of writing became so ingrained that I began to mark more things and my list of the most positive events turned into a real diary. So even though I've already finished my positivity project, I felt benefits of blogging and now I continue to write it.
A natural question may immediately arise: when is it better to write?
Morning and evening? This thing is as individual as fingerprints. For a large part of people morning is a difficult time, when it is difficult to understand where you woke up, let alone any analysis of yesterday's events.
It's different for me.
My mind is so sharp in the morning that I couldn't even write a visual text, the brain would spit out short digested analytical statements about the previous day, all that remained was to register them.
And in the evening, the words flowed freely, sometimes I described several events in detail until it became clear to me which of them was the most positive.
Another lesson: if you have chaos in your head, write.
Asking yourself a question every day "What is the most positive thing that happened today?" I realized how much power lies in asking a question.
Sometimes it seems as if there is no inspiration to write, and there are certainly no topics for writing, but when I ask myself a question, my mind automatically starts looking for answers and I can reason in writing. Even without finding an answer, I may have already written a page and more.
Moral - If you're lacking inspiration, ask yourself this question.
Writing is also good because putting your thoughts in writing is a much slower way to reason than simply brainstorming. In the head thoughts are like a swarm of mosquitoes they buzz around and don't give you peace, you don't understand how many of them or where they are, and when you try to catch them and concentrate, it's the same as trying to catch a mosquito by its stinger - you can wave your hands as much as you want, but the buzzing doesn't stop.
Everything is different in writing. Everything happens much slower than in the head, besides, you can't afford floating images, you have to formulate meaningful sentences. In writing, it is easier to make decisions, choose one alternative from several or summarize something.
It's just easier.
The most positive event
It would seem that this is the case - you took and wrote down the most positive thing that happened that day. But from time to time, mysteriously and unexpectedly, such days appear that seem gloomy and gray.
At such moments comes the realization that you cannot climb a mountain or drive 100 km every day. by bike There are days that are not "OH!". And those days also have the most positive event, it's just that the level of positivity is a little lower.
Such days taught me to enjoy the little things, such as snow outside the window, a great day's lunch in the canteen, a good word heard, a piece of chocolate right before going to write. Sometimes I had to go through the whole day in my memory from morning to night to dig up some little thing that gave a little pinkness or other colors to the gray day.
And I always succeeded, it was not that there was no positive event.
Sometimes it happened that the thought of the moment when it would be necessary to write something in the diary made me observe my surroundings and think: "Isn't something positive happening right now?", "Can I do something positive?".
After doing something really cool, it came right away calmness and relaxation, as if I had done the main work of the day.
Time management skills i also improved a bit. Knowing that one day or another would not have any special events, I made a special effort to plan my time in such a way that there would still be positive events that day. Days, and sometimes entire weeks, turned into a series of pre-planned positive events. But as they say, man plans and god laughs.
And sometimes life surprised me with unexpected events that were much more positive than what I could have planned myself.
Another very interesting observation is the difference between a routine and an unusual (holiday, weekend, event, presentation) day. If on a routine day I usually had to look for something good that had happened, and although when I remembered a positive event I immediately started writing it, on an unusual day I had a huge list of events to choose from.
And imagine that you have been writing such a blog for more than a month and you are learning to enjoy the little things. How many positive events did you notice? Wow! It's like absorbing the energy of life with every cell of yours!
Reading
After completing such a job, doesn't it make you want to look at the result from the side? Of course it hurts! I spent some really inspiring and positive days reading the most positive events of each of my days. Imagine, 385 days and all positive! Something good happened in all of them!
Have you had to deal with Facebook effect, when it seems like all your friends are on vacation all the time and uploading fantastic photos?
If you have 365 friends on Facebook, chances are that even if they only take one day off a year, one of them will be out and about all the time and uploading fantastic photos that will make you jealous.
Have you ever felt jealous of yourself? As I read about my own constant adventures and joys, vividly recalling them, reliving them over and over again, I was, perhaps for the first time in my life, seriously envious of myself.
Wow, that person who is me is incredibly driven! And I would like to! Again and again!
Although in fact we all know that it was both warm and cold, I just wrote down only what seemed positive to me. Now I could experience for myself what the Facebook vacation effect looks like from both sides - the one who uploads the photos and the one who drools over them.
Analysis
And finally, I did a statistical analysis of my 385 positive days.
I assigned 1 to 3 tags ("tagged") to each day's event. And I counted which tags were mentioned most often. Most mentioned:
- People
- Work
- Journey
- A hike
- nature
Does this mean that traveling and hiking in nature, work, communication with people give me the most positivity? Maybe so, maybe not.
Then I selected the best positive event of each week and I counted the tags. See how the results change:
- nature
- A hike
- Journey
- An adventure
- Art
We spend so much time at work and among people that naturally most of the most positive events come from them, but if the work and the people around us are not inspiring, the events they create are overshadowed by other events that week.
I think that joy is not given by people by themselves, but by what you do together with them (hike, trip, adventure).
How much inspiration routine days give me can be understood by counting which days of the week had the most positive events of the week. Thus, as many as 58%'s most positive events of the week took place on weekends. And a number of events that happened on other days happened during the holidays.
You would really like to add more positivity to your daily activities, so that you don't want to run away from it on weekends for a hike, trip or adventure...
I would also divide how many of the most positive events "happened" and how many I "created" myself. So, I made my own 46% of the most positive events of the day. However, my work is even 60% of the most positive events of the week. In other words, my own ideas and actions often overshadowed the events taking place in the environment.
This is where the true power of all of us lies - we can create our own life events that transport us the most, and that, at least according to the results of my experiment, we actually do.
Sharing
I did this whole project by myself and didn't tell anyone about it. When people asked me what I write here, I answered - a diary or a travelogue. In short, I did one thing and said another.
I thought this whole project was nonsense, born of "having nothing to do", interesting only to myself and useless to anyone. The first time I shared the results of the project with a rather limited circle of people, I was surprised by their reactions.
They praised me for persisting in writing every day, praised the idea itself, gave it to their friends, children, significant others and even parents to read. I even gained followers who replicated my project themselves and got business ideas from the project. And now, look, this description is already on the Cloud page!
What does this mean?
Just think how much support I would have received if I had announced the project earlier? Maybe I would have found followers earlier, maybe we could write together and meet regularly and discuss what we wrote?
And here comes another insight: If you have a crazy idea that is nonsense, born from "having nothing to do" and is only interesting to you - share it. You never know where it will lead!
Warning - I shared my project with people who are positive about such things. Watch who you share with, don't tell anyone!
Results
The result of this experiment is myself. I am now a better positivity expert, able to see something positive in any given time frame. But most importantly, that insight is no longer an artificial fabrication of positive things, it has actually become a natural pattern of thinking.
It's just that our days are naturally full of positive events that make life better, but our attention to them is very absent, so such "attention training" can be useful for any person.
in 2017 March. addition: Right now, I'm still writing highlights, but now I'm limiting myself to the top three highlights of the week. It is also a good method to maintain your positive thinking and at the same time make it a habit to sit down at least once a week and see what good I have done.
Writing down the events of the week may teach you to enjoy the little things a little less, but it helps you focus more on the biggest and most important aspirations and goals in life.
in 2018 month of January. addition: I've been thinking for a long time about some kind of positivity movement, where people on some page or some group would all post their greatest achievements every week in a friendly manner and encourage each other in this way.
But there is one reason why I never started this project - it would inevitably lead to comparisons with others, and comparing yourself to others is one of the biggest killers of positive thinking.
So, let's rejoice in what really makes us happy - our own victories and achievements, without any obligation to get people or attention!
This is where an offer to you is born - start your positivity experiment! Let it be 30 days of positivity or 10 weeks of positivity. And let it be an experiment - by no means a commitment to think only positively for the rest of your life from this day forward.
Good luck!
- The boatman 1
Which is now also a blog boatman.lt and books "How to defend your dream" author.↩
A great challenge! I think it's a really, really good way to learn positive thinking and see the positive in every day, no matter how gloomy or boring it is. 🙂
Thank you, Romut! 😉
A good challenge!
And yet it does not seem very complicated!
The page of positive ideas would be a great platform for positive people to get to know each other, to meet in a positive cafe, with positive people for positive conversations live over a positive cup of coffee or positive tea - this is another challenge to slip away from the screen and move into reality, after all, it's spring! 😉
Oh, interesting idea! At the moment, Valtininkas and I have seen positive ideas http://pozityvu.lt - Positive blog. They are preparing to film 1000 reports about active people in Lithuania! 😮
Thanks 🙂 I will start this experiment today. Very inspiring positivity!
Good luck, Sandra!!! 😉
Thank you so much for this post, I am ready to sit down tonight and write about more than one pleasant event. I also offered this test to my mother.
So thank you for reading, doing, sharing!!
Unreal! It seems as if we all know that genius (joy) lies in simplicity, and here are also instructions on how to find it in everyday life:))!
Aha! I really liked Valtininka's ideas on that too! 🙂