The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad — Why Tolerable Is More Dangerous Than Terrible

Well, hello there, my friend.

Jonathan Doyle with you.

Welcome to The Daily Podcast.

Can I suggest to you that a truly terrible job might save your life?

But a tolerable one can steal it.

A truly terrible job may save your life.

How would that be possible?

And a tolerable one can steal it.

This is gonna be a really interesting episode.

This is an episode about what you are prepared to tolerate, and how what

you are prepared to tolerate could cost you way more than a crisis.

Seems a little counterintuitive, doesn't it?

We think that a crisis is dramatic and terrible, and indeed it can be.

But in this episode, I want to explain to you that settling for mild discomfort

can, in the long run, be much more dangerous to you than a sudden crisis.

I wanna share with you some interesting research from, uh, Professor Dan

Gilbert at Harvard, and they did a whole bunch of really interesting research

that suggests that we escape awful situations fast, but we stay stuck in

mildly bad ones for decades because they never hurt enough to trigger change.

We escape awful situations fast.

If your house is on fire, you don't tend to sit there and go, "Well, let's just

see how this goes. Let's just see how bad this gets." If your house is on fire

or if a doctor suddenly tells you that there is some absolutely terrible health

crisis, you tend to act pretty quickly.

We're not, uh… We don't struggle with that as humans.

But what this research suggests is that we will stay stuck in mildly bad

situations for decades because they never hurt enough to trigger change.

I was flying back from a speaking engagement yesterday, and I had my

favorite seat, and I'm thinking to myself, "This is great. There's no one next to

me. This is gonna be a great flight."

And then all of a sudden, right there, there was a, uh, crew member from

Qantas who was transferring to another flight, and they had to sit next to me.

And I thank God for that, because we had a fantastic conversation, and she

was telling me all about how long she's been doing and what she loves about it.

It was a really interesting conversation.

But one of the things that came up for her was she just-- I said, "So why did

you choose this?" You know, "What did you do before this?" And she said, "Oh,

you know, I was in retail, and I was just working in these stores." And,

and she goes, "I didn't wanna spend the rest of my life just going to a

desk and doing something that I hated."

And the passion in her voice was so interesting.

I love people like that and conversations like that, because she

was not prepared to tolerate what she didn't want for decades to come.

I'm not criticizing anybody that has a desk job.

Some people can have a desk job and absolutely love it, but she had enough

self-awareness to know that if she chose the easier, perhaps less interesting

path and just turned up every single day doing the same thing, she'd be miserable.

So she kinda realized to her credit that it was important not to settle for

things that are mildly uncomfortable.

So there's a lot of ways this could play out.

You know, you can imagine being in a, in a tolerable marriage.

I often think about the day that people get married.

You know, they're like, you see them up there, and everyone's smiling.

I mean, you very rarely see someone on their wedding day looking absolutely

miserable, thinking, "This is the dumbest decision I ever made." You don't see that.

You see this expectation, and this happiness, and this joy, and then sure

enough, the challenges of modern life set in, and time passes, and people can

end up really disconnected from that joy, and passion, and intimacy that first

connected them, and they settle, right?

And I'm not judging anybody.

Relationships are difficult.

All sorts of things can happen over the long journey of life.

But it is very possible for us, even in intimate, precious, special

relationships, just to settle.

And think about how many people settle in terms of career.

And again, I wanna say this sensitively, because we all pay the bills, right?

Some of us don't often easily get the choice to follow our absolute passions,

though I actually think there is a great deal we can do in that area.

But can we agree that many people settle?

They're just like, "Eh, it's okay. It's not terrible. It's not, it's

not awful." I mean, do you think God put us on the Earth to be not in…

Like, you know, to tolerate misery for extended periods of time?

Yes, we can endure suffering.

Yes, we can endure hard times.

But do you think that you are here just to settle for mildly

awful over a long period of time?

Or think about it in the area of your health, right?

How many people in the areas of their health kind of just settle?

They're like, "Oh, you know, this is okay. This is just…" Uh, Karen and I were at,

uh, we were at the MCG on Saturday night.

We had 84,000 people there.

And we both noticed a guy sitting a couple of rows down, and I'm gonna

say this so nicely, 'cause I know some of you will think I'm being

judgmental, and I don't know his story, but he, he just looked so unwell.

Not unwell in the sense of there was some obvious serious illness,

but he just looked really unhealthy.

His skin, his, his, his everything.

He just looked like he had fully surrendered.

And again, uh, please understand I'm not judging him.

I don't know his story.

I don't know what might have led to that.

But he looked like somebody who had just decided to settle, that this is how,

what it's gonna be, and my health's gonna be like this, and it really stood out.

And that, uh, it's very possible just to go, "Well, I'm not in, you know,

serious risk of imminent death, so I'll just tolerate my low energy and my low

health and feeling pretty rubbish all the time, and waking up in the mornings

and feeling suboptimal." One of my favorite words at the moment, suboptimal.

You see, because in terms of your health, if you have, like, sudden chronic pain,

you kinda like, y- your whole system goes, something serious has just happened,

and you go and get help for that.

I mean, my last bike crash, as soon as I hit the road, I'm like,

"Yeah, this ain't good." I kind of … It was no negotiation there.

There was no like, "No, I'll be fine.

I'm just gonna, just gonna walk this off." I was like, "No, hospital,

please." So pain, dramatic pain, focuses our attention remarkably.

But that twinge or that feeling of s- illness and sickness and low health that

we can settle for, that can go on for long periods of time, slowly stealing

our capacity and energy along the way.

And here's another thing to think about as we talk about the risk of settling for

not awful, is that isn't it interesting to note that certain people hit rock

bottom and make fascinating, dramatic change, and yet other people can

never hit rock bottom, but just drift along in this sort of plateau of okay?

You see, if you hit rock bottom, if you have times in your life when things

are really hard and difficult and, and you're truly confronted by your

choices and things that have happened to you, then that's dramatic, and that's

noticeable, and that yells at you.

And if it's not you yelling at you, if you hit rock bottom, there's

usually a few people around you going, "Uh, we need to talk."

Right?

So that, it focuses our attention, whereas the plateau of okay means

that we don't face a crisis, and we just endure and put up with the cir-

circumstance or situation indefinitely.

So I've definitely done it.

I can think of one long season in my life where I just put up with mediocre,

suboptimal outcomes for myself.

And the thing that you'll find is when you're doing that,

you will explain it away.

You will find, if you know that you are way under your performance and

you're tolerating things that make you really unhappy, you will know.

And usually what happens is you construct a whole architecture of reasons why

there's nothing you can do about it.

I did this with one of my kids recently.

I just, over a period of a few long conversations, I said, "Look, you, you

have to stop any complaining." And I spoke yesterday at this, uh, at this conference,

and I kinda said that to the people there.

I said, "You have to take full responsibility. You just, you

can't tolerate excuses and blame."

Yes, difficult things may have happened.

Yes, you've got challenges and problems, but what are you gonna do next?

Because a disaster will focus your attention, but tolerable can endure

for a very long period of time.

So I wanna ask you, if I was gonna ask you to audit your life at the

moment, here's an interesting question: Where is your life mildly bad?

Just mildly bad.

Just like, just bad enough to be obvious to you, yet you're kind of not putting

it at the top of your to-do list.

That you'll just tolerate.

You'll just kind of go, "Oh well, this is how it is," and it's too much

effort and work to really change it.

You see, my friend, if you want a different life, you have to

take this radical responsibility.

You have to go, "I am going to be the person responsible for the

outcomes that I am experiencing.

Yes, I live in an, in an environment.

Yes, there are other people in it.

Yes, there are some things that I can't fully control.

But all the things that I can control, my sleep, my attitude, my language,

my disciplines, my processes, my food, my exercise, all these things

that I can control, I will no longer permit them to be tolerably bad.

I'm going to make them excellent." I had a meeting today with somebody

that I was coaching, and one of the points I made was we were talking

about kind of the ability to reframe the meaning of life experiences.

It's an incredibly powerful thing.

Love to do a whole episode on that for you soon.

But the human ability to go through difficulty and provide

different meanings to ourselves.

And the point that I made to them was I genuinely think

this is a one percenter skill.

Like, not even one percenter.

Like, most people, if you explain to them, "Look, you can choose

the meanings that you face when difficult things happen," most people

are gonna go, "That's ridiculous.

You can't.

Bad things happen.

You have to accept them.

You can't change the meaning and just talk yourself out of it."

Well, I actually think you can.

I genuinely do.

I think when the most difficult things happen, you can actually hunt and

find and develop empowering meanings.

But my point really in that conversation was to try and help this person realize

that there are behaviors and beliefs and processes that a very small percentage

of the population follow, and this idea of celebrating for tolerable unhappiness

is what large numbers of people do.

It's that old story of the frog in the boiling water, right?

You put him in cold water and slowly turn that heat up.

They don't really notice until it's too late.

But if you're tolerating something in your life that could be slowly creating a huge

problem for you, you need to change that.

You know, termites are not a problem in a house the first day they show up, right?

It's not like a termite, the first termite lands in your woodwork, and

then the house falls down the next day.

It's literally that this thing ticks away.

It's, it's a long process.

So you're better off making a decision to get after these

things as early as possible.

Okay?

So can I give you a quote from Gilbert's research at Harvard?

There's a really interesting phraseology they use, where they say they call it the

peculiar longevity of things not so bad.

The peculiar longevity of things not so bad.

It's so interesting that language, the, the, the longevity of it, that

you can, you can let this stuff run for years if it's not so bad.

But I don't think the key to the life that you really want is based

along the highway of not so bad.

It's on the path of taking responsibility and making significant change.

All right?

So if I could give you a final thought, I would suggest that the danger you face

in life is actually not rock bottom.

The real danger is comfortable enough.

The real danger isn't rock bottom.

The real danger is comfortable enough.

The real danger is that you just get, "It's, it's okay.

It, it's all right.

What I eat's all right.

The quality of my intimate relationships are all right.

My job, it's all right.

My kids, they're all right.

My fitness, yeah, it's okay." Because at the end of your life, like, are you gonna

be happy with all right and okay instead of spectacular, remarkable, unbelievable?

Why not have those words describing the end of your life?

Okay, so have we got this?

Have we got the summary here, which is just the research shows us that people,

it is, uh, that real pain can save your life because it focuses your attention.

But a tolerable life, a tolerable, difficult situation that's just, just

not quite bad enough to really focus you, that can steal your life because

it will just, just, just keep tripping along each day, month after month, year

after year, and it never gets addressed.

So to finish, as I said a moment ago, if we were gonna audit your life, what is the

thing that you would say is mildly bad?

And what do you need to do to begin to make that significant change?

Okay, come and follow me on Instagram, uh, jdoylespeaks, one word.

I'm posting there every day.

Throughout the day, you can see how I am doing life, so you can see

whether or not I'm walking my talk.

So jdoylespeaks for Instagram.

YouTube, if you're a YouTube follower, you can find me at

jonathandoylespeaks, and everything else is on the website, jonathandoyle.co.

You can book me for event speaking, for, uh, corporate conference

events, those sorts of things.

Any way I can be useful to you and your team, you can find me there, and also,

uh, coaching for executives and leaders.

You can find it all at jonathandoyle.co.

All right, my friend, one more time, remember that the

danger is not rock bottom.

The danger is comfortable enough.

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My name's Jonathan Doyle, and you and I are gonna talk again tomorrow