The Power of Avoiding Bad: Why Removing Negativity Should Be Your Priority
The Power of Avoiding Bad: Why Removing Negativity Should Be Your Priority
As you seek excellence and impact in your life, the conventional wisdom often emphasizes the importance of doing good, striving for success, and achieving greatness every day. However, what if I told you that the key to unlocking your full potential is based not in doing more good, but in avoiding bad at all cost? This might sound counterintuitive, but research suggests that bad is more powerful than good (The Power of Bad) and avoiding it should be your primary focus. To give you an example, a newspaper article with a negative title gets read 7 times more than one with the same content but with a positive title. The loss of 50$ invested sticks around in our mind for much longer than 50$ we won.
Psychological studies have long shown that negative experiences have a greater impact on our brains than positive ones. The financial loss, the betrayal, or feeling excluded from a group of friends sticks around a lot longer than a positive experience. This negativity bias means that we “force ourselves” to feel the pain of a negative comment, or a negative performance feedback more powerfully than we feel the joy for a compliment and an accomplishment. All human interactions are biased toward the negative and we tend to notice…
