#471 When Things Go Wrong

I got up this morning even earlier than I usually do—fired up to start hammering some +1s to hit a fun milestone.

So… I go through my morning ritual for the x thousandth time—meditation, movement. Done. Supplements in? Yep. Little Tian Chi energy drink ready to go? Check. I’m ready to rock.

Then…

Oops. Tech issues. Mission Thwarted.

Quick context: I create these +1 on Dropbox Paper. (Which, btw, for those who may not know, is fantastic—beautifully minimalist design. Perfect!)

Except for this morning.

The entire service is down. I can’t access any of the +1s Paper documents I was working on nor can I create a new +1 in Paper.

Hmmm…

Weird. Tried reloading. No luck. The dreaded 500 error. Did a quick Google search. (Which, you might have noticed, is pretty epic as well. Hah.) Yep. Wow. The entire service is down.

Fascinating.

Now, as per our Optimizade +1, I kinda actually like it when things go “wrong” these days. Although I had a very brief hit of “Hmmm… That thwarts my plans for this morning,” in this case it was pretty easy to alchemize the moment antifragile style and use this as an opportunity to appreciate how RARELY things go wrong.

So, I took a nice, deep breath, smiled and thought to myself, “Wow. Technology is ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. I get to press little buttons with letters on them on this plastic machine-thing, see those letters elegantly appear on my screen and somehow manipulate that data in real-time on other computers around the world?”

That’s CRAZY.

And… Every once in a while it doesn’t work.

That’s Today’s +1.

The next time something doesn’t go the way you want, see if you can step back and appreciate just how often things DO WORK.

Of course, we wouldn’t be here today if our ancient ancestors didn’t have super-sensitive brains constantly on the look out for things that could go wrong in their environment (aka, a LION around that corner that may EAT them), but let’s cultivate the ability to flip that stress-response switch off and deliberately choose to relax into a deep appreciation of life rather than freak out.

btw: I started typing this +1 on my Mac “TextEdit” program (which is my second-favorite minimalist editing doc for simple things when I’m 100% offline) and, mid-way through, Dropbox Paper was back up and running again.

Astonishing.

Life is good. Let’s appreciate it.

And let’s use any lemons we may get today to make some delicious (sugar-free, stevia-sweetened) Optimizade!!