I love listening to podcasts when driving. I think it’s one good way of using my alone time as I’m hitting two birds with one stone, me getting to where I’m supposed to go (literally) and me continuing my journey towards self-improvement.

I’m currently listening to the Mindvalley Podcast and this reflection is about one of the episodes where Eric Edmeades was the guest lecturer.

He was talking about hindsight window. Hindsight window is the window of time between an event that you perceived as bad and the time sometime in the future when you realized that it was meant to happen. It is said that the longer your hindsight window the less you are happy and the shorter it is, the happier you will be.

Let me give you an example. I failed a couple of subjects in the university which of course sucks, but if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have taken my graduate course and I wouldn’t realize that I could be a good student.

Another example, I wanted to be a software developer real bad but my first employer dumped me in the software testing capability, at that moment I feel lost and frustrated but eventually, it became a career that I really love.

We might be feeling really bad because we were fired from a job, someone broke our heart, you figured in an accident and all of those “bad” stuff, but what will make a big difference is if you ask yourself, what might I gain from this “bad” event?

What’s my point? There will be events in our lives that will suck, that will hurt and they will make us feel bad, but, your reality is what you make it. If you think you lost, then you’ll keep on losing. If you think you were hurt, then you’ll keep on hurting. If you feel something bad happened because of you, then anything bad that happens will always be your fault.

Finding gratitude amidst the pain, the bad luck, the accidents is one way of turning this around. Find gratitude even when you are having the worst day of your life. Find gratitude even if you were fired from a job. Find gratitude even if someone breaks your heart. It is hard, but it will keep you sane and it will keep you happy. The goal is to keep our hindsight window short!

So the next time something bad happens, ask yourself a couple of times, “what might I gain from this?” until you get your answer.

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