A Thousand Good Reasons to be Happy, and Why They’re Often Invisible

We live in a massive, buzzing, busy world where billions of things are happening everywhere…

• There’s a billion drivers in a billion cars swerving and snaking through roads all over the globe.
• There’s a Japanese manufacturer trying to land a can of sport drink on the surface of the moon.¹
• There’s ten billion billion insects scurrying and fluttering over the face of the earth.
• There are two hundred Russians digging for diamonds a thousand feet under the ground in Yakutia.

On top of the natural buzz, there’s a constant spray of outside information coming at us, a rain of info-confetti we can never wave out of our faces.

• The media industry offers thousands of television channels, packed with twenty-four hours of programming a day.
• The advertising industry serves up millions of ads each day, everywhere we look.
• We use social media to crank out the confetti for each other – 31 million Facebook messages, 350,000 tweets, and 50,000 Instagram posts every minute.²

Then there’s the inner spray of imagination, like a Blue Man Group flinging paint-water and toilet paper in the theater of our minds. We think tens of thousands of thoughts per day as the stream of consciousness fire hoses our brains.

Even when we escape the mayhem to the serenity of the Zen garden, we’re still overloaded because of the limits of our perception itself. Take a Zen moment right now to listen. What do you hear? A computer fan? Someone talking? A radio blaring in the next room?

Right now, I hear the hum of a television, a pressure washer gunning outside my window, a computer fan, a slamming car door.

While it seems like we’re hearing these sounds for the first time, they’ve been there all along, tapping our eardrums. They don’t get our attention, because there’s too much information competing for too little mind-space.³

Filtering Reality

We handle this overload by filtering. Our minds are wired to work in this crazy-busy world by catching information we believe is important and passing the rest through.

In this way we separate reality into two categories: perceived reality and ignored reality.

Let’s say we’re filtering out ninety-nine percent of the reality around us and letting one percent in. That means one percent is perceived reality. The other ninety-nine percent is ignored reality.

This graph illustrates:

Filtering Out the Good

Now let’s imagine we see identify each square on this “graph of reality” as good and bad, starting with some good ones:

• There’s air for my lungs so I can stay alive. That’s a good square.
• The sun is out today, and the blue sky is beautiful. That’s two good squares.
• I have eyes to see the sun and sky, which is much better than being blind. That’s a good square.
• I feel safe right now. No one is threatening me. That’s a good square.

We can go on and on finding literally thousands of “good squares” on the graph of reality.

Then the bad squares:

• My job is in jeopardy, layoffs are imminent. That’s a bad square.
• I have a toothache. That’s a bad square.
• A friend is struggling with alcoholism. That’s a bad square.

We can go on finding bad squares, but the more we look objectively at the real world, the more we find: the good squares massively outnumber the bad.

The problem is, it’s human nature to overlook a thousand good things to focus on one bad thing. Imagine your child comes home with a report card, and everything is A’s, but one is an F. What gets our immediate attention? The F. We immediately ask, “What happened here?”

As with the report card, so with everything else. It’s extremely easy to focus 98% of our time dwelling on the 2% of the things in our life that aren’t working, while ignoring everything else that’s going just fine. It’s human nature to be alert to problems so we can solve them, which means we’re naturally more alert to the bad squares on the graph than the good ones.

More Good than Bad

Now let’s add some detail to the graph:

The yellow squares are things we’d consider good in the world around us, and the black squares are the things we’d consider bad. Then the red border lines are the things we perceive, while the black border lines are the things we ignore.

Reality is, there’s a lot more good out there than bad. But our limited perception makes it seem the opposite when we’re focused on problems and the bad things that clamor for our attention. In this case, five out of the six squares we’re perceiving are bad. Since we’re filtering reality this way, all we see are the bad squares. There’s a lot of good out there, but we’re blind to it.

Life offers us a thousand good reasons to be happy, but these are often invisible. The way our perception filters reality has a profound effect on the amount of good and bad we see.

Which means we need to reset the filter and see more good. Whenever we’re feeling down we can get an instant boost by identifying the yellow squares on the graph.

¹The makers of Japanese sports drink Pocari Sweat, are placing a can of it on the surface of the moon. Patrick Winn, “Get ready for ads on the moon,” USA Today, August 17, 2015.
²Matt Kapco, “7 staggering social media use by-the-minute stats,” CIO, April 28, 2015.
³This entire section is excerpted and adapted from Erik Van Alstine, Automatic Influence: New Power for Change in Work and Life (New York: Stone Lounge Press, 2016), p. 166.