21 Day No-Complaint Test
I’m now starting a 21 Day No-Complaint Experiment (go 21 days without complaining, start back at 0 if you notice you complain). In discussing his own 21 day experiment, Tim Ferriss offers the following definition:
I defined “complaining” for myself as follows: describing an event or person negatively without indicating next steps to fix the problem. I later added the usual 4-letter words and other common profanity as complaint qualifiers, which forced me to reword, thus forcing awareness and more precise thinking.
Taking something like a negative description and adding the “next steps to fix the problem” is a sort of process that can be generalized to any time you feel fear, frustration, or negative emotions. Negative emotions are (can be) useful, because they can tell you about important information in your environment. The key often is to turn them into a “How to …?” sort of question (next steps to fix the problem). For example, if you start feeling frustration at not accomplishing a task, if you immediately take that as a cue to ask “How could I do this more quickly and easily? What assumption am I making here that might not be true?” and so on, the frustration becomes useful instead of just “negative”.
(I find I have some resistance to “How to …” questions, because if I’m used to getting a certain result (usually maintained with a no-action question like “Why do I always get this result?!”) and then I move to a “How to …” question (like “How do I get a different result in this situation? What exactly could I do differently to get a different result?”), the possibility of getting a good answer stands as a certain kind of threat to things that have been less than optimal but in a way comfortable.)
After doing this for 4 months, Ferriss noted that his “lazier thinking evolved from counterproductive commiserating to reflexive systems thinking. Each description of a problem forced me to ask and answer: What policy can I create to avoid this in the future?”
Here we go … Day 0.