"What is the positive of this situation?"

When facing a minor annoyance, Naval Ravikant has learned to ask himself the question “What is the positive of this situation?”.

It may seem cliche, but there really is a positive to almost every inconvenience.

Last year, I broke my foot just after my first professional season began. It set me back 3 months, which proved to be enough time to undo a year of significant progress. I ended up getting released 2 days after being cleared to play (I was cleared on an off day, or else it would have been 1 day).

But I wasn’t upset. Disappointed? Yes. But not angry. Given the circumstances and the nature of professional baseball, I understood the move. But that’s not why I wasn’t upset.

I was not upset because when I broke my foot, I began a daily journaling practice that I have not broken yet. I began writing and reading more again and fell back in love with books and words. For the first time in years, I was thinking clearly and beginning to understand the connection between my thoughts, actions, and reality.

I came home and kept training for a few months, determined to get back to peak form, but in the back of my mind, I knew things weren’t the same. One day, I fully embraced the fact that my writing was more important to me than baseball.

But let’s be honest; if I had my pick, would this have been the path I’d have chosen for myself?

Absolutely not.

But that is exactly the point. It wasn’t for me to choose whether or not to break my foot. It WAS my choice to figure out what I would spend all the extra time doing. I could have brooded and cursed my luck and played video games all day.

But that’s not my style. Instead, I chose to fill the time with something I had abandoned. And it turned into the single most important decision I’ve made in the past year.

The positive is sometimes going to be so insignificant that the loss trumps the gain. You won’t always get an equivalent exchange. But that’s not the point. The point of the question is to give yourself some agency because when things go wrong, we often feel a hopelessness that tries to cripple us.

So shake it off, look for the positive, and use it to keep you moving beyond the bad. You cannot change what has already happened, but you can use that situation to shape what WILL happen.

So if anything unfortunate has happened to you lately, you are definitely allowed to be upset about it for a moment. But after a minute or two, ask yourself:

“What is the positive of this situation?”