Chapter 32 SECTION VII Trying to Gain From Losses

True happiness is not necessarily pleasure, it is mostly a kind of victory. The most important thing in life is not investing what you earn, anyone can do that.What really matters is how to profit from losses.This requires wisdom, in order to show people's superior wisdom and inferior stupidity. While I was working on this book, I visited President Robert Hudgens one day at the University of Chicago to ask him how to deal with worry.His answer: "I've always followed the advice of the late Sears president Julius Rosenwald 'If you only have one lemon in your hand, make a lemonade'."

This is the approach taken by the president of the University of Chicago, but the average person does just the opposite.If people found that fate offered him only a lemon, he would immediately give up and say, "I am finished! My life is so bad! There is no chance at all." So he turned against the world and fell into self-pity .If a wise man were given a lemon, he would say, "What can I learn from this misfortune? How can I improve my current situation? How can I make lemonade from this lemon?" The great psychologist Adler spent his whole life studying human beings and their potentials. He once declared that he had discovered one of the most incredible characteristics of human beings - "humans have a power to turn defeat into victory".

What Thelma Thompson discovered was the same truth that the Greeks discovered 500 years before Jesus: "The most beautiful things are often the hardest." The late author William Perissau wrote: "The most important thing in life is not to invest with your income. Anyone can do that. The real important thing is how to make a profit from the loss. This requires wisdom, and it shows that people are wise and stupid." When Perissau wrote this, he had lost a leg in an accident.However, I also know one person who lost both legs and was able to turn a profit.His name was Ben Folsom.I met him in the elevator of a hotel in Atlantic City, Georgia.As I stepped into the elevator, I noticed that this cheerful-looking man had no legs and was sitting in a wheelchair in the corner of the elevator.When the elevator stopped at the floor he was going to, he kindly asked me to move to the corner so he could move the wheelchair more smoothly. "I'm sorry!" he said, "for inconveniencing you!" with a warm smile on his face.

As I stepped out of the elevator to my room, I couldn't stop thinking about the happy disabled man.So I went to him and asked him to tell me his story. "It happened in 1929," he said with a smile on his face. "I went up the hill to cut hickory, and I piled the wood in my car, and I was driving home. Suddenly a log slipped, and I turned a sharp turn. , the splint caught on the axle, and I was immediately thrown into a tree, injuring my spine and paralyzing my legs. "I was 24 and I haven't walked a step since then." A 24-year-old youth was sentenced to spend his whole life in a wheelchair!I asked him how he was able to face the truth so bravely.He said: "I can't!" He said that he resisted angrily and resented the trick of fate.But as he got older, he found that resistance didn't help him, it just made him mean. "I finally realized," he said, "that when people treat me kindly and politely, I should at least respond politely and kindly to them."

I asked him again if, after all these years, he still felt that incident was a misfortune.He said, "No! I'm almost glad it happened." He told me that after that shock and resentment phase, he began to live in a completely different world.He started reading and developed a penchant for literature. In the past 14 years, he said that he has read at least 1,400 books, these books have expanded his field, and his life has been richer than he could have imagined before.He also began to enjoy music, and the symphony that now moved him had previously only made him drowsy.However, the real most significant change is that he has time to think. “For the first time in my life,” he said, “I really looked at the world with my heart and realized its value. I finally realized that a lot of the things I was trying to pursue had no real value.”

He became interested in politics because of reading, he researched public issues, he gave speeches from a wheelchair!He got to know people, and people got to know him.He was in a wheelchair and also became Georgia's Secretary of State. Philosopher Nietzsche believes that excellent and outstanding people "not only endure the unbearable, but are also willing to undertake this challenge." The more I study high achievers, the more I am convinced that much of their success is due to some kind of flaw that unleashes their potential.William James once said: "Our greatest weakness may give us an unexpected boost."

Yes, if Milton hadn't lost his eyesight, he might not have been able to write such wonderful poems. Beethoven may have been able to complete more moving musical works because of his deafness. Helen Keller's creative career was entirely inspired by deafness and blindness. If Tchaikovsky's marriage hadn't been so tragic that it nearly drove him to suicide, he might not have been able to compose the immortal Symphony of Pathos. Fosdick mentioned in his book: "There is a Scandinavian proverb that says that the icy arctic wind has created the Eskimos. When do we believe that people will feel comfortable because of their comfortable days and no difficulties? Happy? Just the opposite. A person with self-pity does not cease to feel sorry for himself even when he is comfortably reclining on the couch. On the contrary, people who are happy regardless of circumstances are often happy. They take responsibility bravely and never run away. I want to emphasize Again—the hardy Eskimo is made of the icy arctic wind."

If we are really too discouraged to see any hope of conversion, here are two reasons why we should at least try, two reasons that guarantee that we will only get better if we try, not worse. Reason number one: We might succeed. The second reason: Even if it fails, the very very end of the effort forces us to look forward, not regret.It drives out negative thoughts and replaces them with positive ones.It fuels creativity and keeps us busy, leaving no time or mood to grieve over things that are past. The world-renowned violinist Ole Bull was playing at a concert in Paris. Suddenly the A string of the violin broke, and he played the complete piece with the remaining three strings without changing his expression.Fosdick said: "This is life. If you break a string, you can continue to play with the remaining three strings."

This is not just life, it is beyond life, it is the triumph of life! If I could, I would engrave and hang in every school these words of William Perissau: "The most important thing in life is not just to use what you have, anyone will do the same. The really important issue is how to profit from your losses. This requires true wisdom, and it shows people's superior wisdom and inferior stupidity."