【推荐2】You have probably heard the saying, “When life gives you lemons (柠檬), make lemonade.” Since lemons are considered bitter and lemonade is considered sweet, the saying tells you to make the best out of a bad situation.

Unfortunately, when something bad happens, it’s not uncommon for most people to talk about it to anyone who’ll listen, and complain (抱怨) about life, “Why me?” That’s like getting a bag of lemons, putting them down, and thinking “Lemons taste bad! I’d rather have chocolate!” If you don’t make anything with the lemons, they will go bad. But what if you did something with them? What if you made lemonade? Isn’t it possible to do something similar with a bad situation? Here’s an example: Let’s say you’re about to go to the movies, but you discover you have a flat tire (瘪胎). You consider this a terrible thing. After all, you are really looking forward to spending some time with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Now you’re all stressed out, hating the tire, the car, and your life. But what if you called AAA, got your tire fixed or got caught up on things that you’d been meaning to do? What if you did some reading, or had coffee with a friend instead? A bad experience can be turned into something good. Almost anything can work itself out into something better. You can’t change what has happened, right? So make the best of it. I’m not saying it will be easy. The easy thing to do is complain about your bad situation and not consider what it could be turned into.

Next time when some unfortunate things happen stop and think, “How can I turn this around? How can I make it an awesome experience?” You needn’t fear difficulties. As long as you keep on changing it, you will see the benefits at last.

【推荐3】In today’s motivational literature, failure is often viewed as something to be celebrated. Inspirational speakers are fond of quoting the words of the novelist Samuel Beckett—“Fail again. Fail better.” It seems that disappointments are an essential stepping stone to success, a turning point in our life story that will ultimately end in victory.

However, psychological researches find most of us struggle to handle failure constructively. In other words, we fail to “fail forward”. We find ways to devalue the task at which we failed, and become less motivated to persevere(坚持) and reach our goals. This phenomenon is known as the “sour-grape effect”, which was discovered by Professor Hallgeir Sjastad.

Sjastad explains that “sour-grape effect” is a self-protective mechanism(机制). “Most of us picture ourselves as able people, so when feedback(反馈) from others suggests the opposite, it poses a serious threat to that self-image,” he says. “The easiest way out is to deny or explain away the outside signal, so we can keep a positive sense of self. We do this even without noticing.”

If you have one bad interview for your dream job, you might convince yourself that you don’t really want it at all, and stop applying for similar positions. The same goes if you fail to impress at a sports trial, or if you lose a singing contest. “We tend to explain away our shortcomings and convince ourselves our ‘Plan C’ is actually our ‘Plan A’,” Sjastad says.

It doesn’t mean we should persevere in goals all the time. It can be healthy to change if the process is no longer making us happy. But the “sour-grape effect” may lead us to come to this decision prematurely, rather than hanging on a little and seeing whether we might learn and improve.

Failures are unavoidable. By learning to face the disappointment instead of devaluing its importance and pretending nothing happened, however, you may find it easier to achieve your goals.