Author Derek Sivers was on the Modern Wisdom podcast recently and gave an illustration that highlights how counterintuitive and illogical human reactions are.<\/p>\n\n\n
He paints a picture of three Olympic athletes standing on the winner’s platform after their competition and asks, “Which one is happiest?”<\/p>\n\n\n
Well, the Gold Medalist is happiest, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n
But then Sivers asks, “Who is the next happiest?”<\/p>\n\n\n
Your first instinct would be to say the Silver Medalist would be next in line, but then you pause and consider the situation… Maybe not?<\/p>\n\n\n
Sivers maintains that the second happiest is the Bronze Medalist and his reasoning has the ring of truth to it.<\/p>\n\n\n
The Bronze Medalist is thinking, “Out of all those who competed, I am one of the few to stand here and represent my country before the entire world. If I had been a fraction of a second slower, I wouldn’t be here, but I made it to the platform!”<\/p>\n\n\n
On the other hand, the Silver Medalist is the least happy of all on the platform – by a long shot. He is standing there thinking, “I just barely missed it – if only I had pushed myself a little harder, I could have had the gold. I could have been first place.”<\/p>\n\n\n
I think Sivers is right. And I think it says something profound about how we allow our minds to frame our experiences.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Author Derek Sivers was on the Modern Wisdom podcast recently and gave an illustration that highlights how counterintuitive and illogical human reactions are. He paints a picture of three Olympic athletes standing on the winner’s platform after their competition and asks, “Which one is happiest?” Well, the Gold Medalist is happiest, of course. But then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6310,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6309\/revisions\/6310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}