Happiness is a Glass Half Empty
The phrase, ‘You are what you eat’, influences people to analyze their nutrition and diet and modify their lifestyle. However, people rarely stop to think about or even consider that ‘You are what you think’, and that this form of living vastly affects an individual’s life. People in general perceive and measure happiness by how successful they are in life. Oliver Burkeman, author of the “This Column Will Change Your Life” section for The Guardian Newspaper, writes in detail about the way human thinking affects their feelings of happiness. The article, “Happiness is a Glass Half Empty”, by Oliver Burkeman, elaborates on the idea that happiness should be perceived in a negative way to achieve a higher level of …show more content…
These products lasted only a few weeks in regular store shelves, before the public completely rejected them. The story serves the purpose to present the ironical situation that they’re in, and capture the reader’s attention, by demonstrating how the failure of those products, resulted in the success of the museum. “Perhaps nobody wanted to contemplate the prospect of failure” (Burkeman 2012). Perhaps this is the reason why many of the big industries continued to fail prospectively, because even after having more than one unsuccessful product, they did not stop to analyze the defects, and reconstruct them to produce something better. This strategy proves to be effective because the reader grasps the idea that Burkeman is trying to get across, which is that in order to succeed, one needs to train the mind to be ready to fail. To continue to exemplify this concept, he includes examples such as Colgate’s TV dinners and Pepsi’s AM Breakfast Cola, products that do not sound appetizing, yet were still sent off into the consumer industry, and became failures. In paragraph 6, Burkeman writes, “Failure is everywhere. It’s just that most of the time we’d rather avoid confronting that fact”. Indeed, …show more content…
In the article, he cites the sources and works of two professionals. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot bases her studies on the effect that success has on people’s behavior and mind, and the differences between failure and success. Tali Sharot also wrote a book based on her findings, “The Optimism Bias”, where she explains that there are basically two types of people, the ones who are able to cope with almost any circumstance, and those who have a higher degree of difficulty with a given complicated situation. For example, the Stoics highly believed that in order to achieve success, one must not complain, and instead learn from what is experienced and move on with the new knowledge. From this, Burkeman concludes that it is people’s “relentless effort to feel happy… what makes [them] miserable” (Burkeman 2012), and fall in a depressed state when they fail. Therefore Burkeman suggests the alternative that in order to feel like one has gained more, one needs to train the mind to fail. Not to live with a certain degree of negativity, but rather to travel the “negative path”, in order to arrive at a much more successful destination. Burkeman achieves the purpose of having his reader truly rely on the information he is giving, because he is dating back to the ancient philosophers, who thrived and have continued to thrive throughout the
The phrase, ‘You are what you eat’, influences people to analyze their nutrition and diet and modify their lifestyle. However, people rarely stop to think about or even consider that ‘You are what you think’, and that this form of living vastly affects an individual’s life. People in general perceive and measure happiness by how successful they are in life. Oliver Burkeman, author of the “This Column Will Change Your Life” section for The Guardian Newspaper, writes in detail about the way human thinking affects their feelings of happiness. The article, “Happiness is a Glass Half Empty”, by Oliver Burkeman, elaborates on the idea that happiness should be perceived in a negative way to achieve a higher level of …show more content…
These products lasted only a few weeks in regular store shelves, before the public completely rejected them. The story serves the purpose to present the ironical situation that they’re in, and capture the reader’s attention, by demonstrating how the failure of those products, resulted in the success of the museum. “Perhaps nobody wanted to contemplate the prospect of failure” (Burkeman 2012). Perhaps this is the reason why many of the big industries continued to fail prospectively, because even after having more than one unsuccessful product, they did not stop to analyze the defects, and reconstruct them to produce something better. This strategy proves to be effective because the reader grasps the idea that Burkeman is trying to get across, which is that in order to succeed, one needs to train the mind to be ready to fail. To continue to exemplify this concept, he includes examples such as Colgate’s TV dinners and Pepsi’s AM Breakfast Cola, products that do not sound appetizing, yet were still sent off into the consumer industry, and became failures. In paragraph 6, Burkeman writes, “Failure is everywhere. It’s just that most of the time we’d rather avoid confronting that fact”. Indeed, …show more content…
In the article, he cites the sources and works of two professionals. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot bases her studies on the effect that success has on people’s behavior and mind, and the differences between failure and success. Tali Sharot also wrote a book based on her findings, “The Optimism Bias”, where she explains that there are basically two types of people, the ones who are able to cope with almost any circumstance, and those who have a higher degree of difficulty with a given complicated situation. For example, the Stoics highly believed that in order to achieve success, one must not complain, and instead learn from what is experienced and move on with the new knowledge. From this, Burkeman concludes that it is people’s “relentless effort to feel happy… what makes [them] miserable” (Burkeman 2012), and fall in a depressed state when they fail. Therefore Burkeman suggests the alternative that in order to feel like one has gained more, one needs to train the mind to fail. Not to live with a certain degree of negativity, but rather to travel the “negative path”, in order to arrive at a much more successful destination. Burkeman achieves the purpose of having his reader truly rely on the information he is giving, because he is dating back to the ancient philosophers, who thrived and have continued to thrive throughout the