Why you should look for 1 advantage over 99 disadvantages

“Look at the strengths” and “find the strengths” are words that I have heard too often since I was young. But there is a real reason these words have become so common. Because people are very lazy to see the good. Let’s look at some studies.

According to studies by psychologists, people spend longer looking at pictures of bad events than pictures of good events. It is evidence that the interest in the disadvantages is greater than the advantages. Another scholar has developed the term ‘positive-negative emotional cognition asymmetry’. As a result of his research, people tended to cling to the bad points of others more than the good points, and this was evident in a very large number of people.

Another study reviewed 17 papers on the way people interpret and describe the events they experience, such as how sports fans interpret sports games or how students describe their day in their diaries. As a result, across various domains, including work, politics, sports, and personal life, people were unconsciously more inclined to mention and explain negative events than positive ones.

Finding flaws is a human specialty. It is an area that is originally good at, and in game terms, it is a passive skill. Even if you don’t have to learn it, it’s already an innate skill. However, finding advantages is an active technology. You have to pay a price to find it, and it takes effort to use it.

Then why do we have to ‘find the strengths’? Let’s look at Tolstoy’s quote.

“All happy families are alike. But each unhappy family is unhappy in a different way.”

What do you need to do to make your family happy? Will we find and analyze the shortcomings of the unhappy family? Or will you seek out and absorb the strengths of happy families? Based on this quote by Tolstoy, it is very inefficient to find faults in unhappy families. There are too many examples and too many small and personal reasons, so it’s a bunch to apply to me. However, if you look at happy families, there is a common advantage, so the probability that anyone can apply that advantage is very high. In other words, advantage finding is more useful.

In 1990, when Jerry Sternin was working for an international organization helping children in poverty, he was tasked with reducing malnutrition among Vietnamese children. He was due 6 months. He read a lot of material about malnutrition among children in Vietnam. Sanitation was poor, there was no adequate supply of clean water, and most rural people were ignorant of malnutrition.

However, he judged that this analysis was not very helpful in reality. Such systemic problems had to be improved, but not only were there financial and political difficulties, but they could not be solved in a short period of six months. Children continued to be sick and dying from poverty.

So, the decision he made was to ‘find the good points’. Even if there are problems everywhere? Yes. Even in the worst situation, full of countless failures, success breathes everywhere. Sternin decided to seek out children from poor families who were not malnourished and find the strengths they share in common. And he eventually found some common strengths.

Parents of healthy children divided the food into four portions, while parents of malnourished children divided the same amount of food into two portions. In this case, the children had to digest a large amount at once, so the children’s stomach was strained. And above all, the food was different. This was a very important advantage. Parents of healthy children caught small shrimps and crabs, mixed them with rice, and even fed them with sweet potato leaves. At that time, in rural Vietnam, small shrimps and crabs were the food of adults and were not fed to children, and sweet potato leaves were not eaten. However, shrimp, crab, and sweet potato leaves supplemented protein and vitamins that children tend to lack. And these three things are all freely obtained from nature.

Based on this advantage, Sternin programmed and applied it to 100 households. After six months, the children’s nutritional status improved by 65%. Afterwards, this program was implemented in various regions of Vietnam, and many children were able to overcome the pain of malnutrition and dream big.

Some flaws can be fixed quickly. However, some problems are structural, systemic, and practically difficult to solve. However, even in such an environment, there are those who are victorious. There are crabs and small shrimp that were not fed to children in the rice fields, and there are bound to be sweet potato leaves in the fields. We are masters at finding flaws, but now let’s become masters at finding strengths. If you do, one day you will be able to see the glory of learning and finding the good in your life.