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Sample Action Hack
PictureAlec Torelli

​The Details:
Riddle me this: how can you lose twenty thousand dollars in five minutes and be happy about it? People usually think this is a trick question. No one likes to lose money. But with the right approach and the W2W Hack, any situation, however awful it seems, can become a positive motivational experience. This Hack teaches us how to manage the emotions sparked by the inevitable disasters of life: losing money, job termination, grief from the deaths of friends and family, and dozens of more mundane sorrows. We all know people who always seem to be having a bad day, and other people who are generally upbeat, optimistic, and enthusiastic, despite having the same problems as everyone else. The difference between the constant complainer and the habitually happy is driven by two motivational beliefs: the realization that things will not always go as planned (see the Reality Hack for more on this), and the understanding that we can control and regulate our subjective responses to life’s tragedies, disappointments, and curveballs.

The answer to my riddle is simple. If you take a risk and fail, you want to minimize your losses, right? That is exactly what my friend Alec Torelli does when he plays professional poker. By the time he was twenty-seven, Alec had earned over three million dollars from poker tournament play. Alec regularly loses large sums of money, because he cannot control the cards he is dealt. But he does control his response to his hand. If he knows he cannot win and folds, he has made the right decision in a hopeless situation. He might have lost twenty thousand dollars on that hand, but he kept himself from losing two hundred thousand, so he’s happy to see the smaller sum go. Like poker players, we can convert negativity into emotionally beneficial outcomes by focusing on improving ourselves rather than ruminating about life’s unavoidable misfortunes. You may have noticed that this book is dedicated to my son Robert, who died unexpectedly at age thirty. How could this tragic event possibly be positive? When Robert died, I realized fully all of his numerous wonderful attributes—things that I had sometimes not noticed or taken for granted while he was alive. I modeled his best behaviors and began to teach others his kind ways, and so began to transform a parent’s most devastating emotion, grief for their child, into a positive legacy. The W2W Hack takes practice, but a person who is aware and perceptive can repress spontaneous emotional reactions, stop rumination in its tracks, and convert their energy toward constructive resolutions to terrible situations.

Why it works:
Believe it or not, bad things will happen to you. Failure, disappointment, and rejection are part of  life. People react to misfortune automatically—many physical and psychological responses are beyond our control. We may show typical avoidance behaviors and feel nauseous, confused, shocked, distraught, or angry. But after a few minutes, we begin to reflect on what has happened, and start to try to cope. Our coping behaviors come from patterns of behavior that we have learned over the course of our lives. In other words, we make a choice about how to cope based on what we know. Some people dwell on the negative consequences; they might see losing a job as a deflating end point, not an opportunity to succeed and make more money elsewhere. These people will direct their cognitive horsepower toward quelling the negative emotions rather than toward future goals and objectives. They might try to mask or disguise the emotion with nonproductive self-handicapping strategies like drinking or substance abuse. This type of coping may squash the feeling, but not offer real recovery from the event.

Others consciously and deliberately regulate their emotions by redirecting the energy hijacked by the emotion into something productive, aiming to transform the negative situation into a positive outcome. This second coping strategy does not mean the uncomfortable emotion disappears, but it does shift the focus off the feeling and off the event, which can’t be changed no matter how badly you feel about it. This Hack asks you to realize that your emotion is nonproductive and doesn’t help you recover; rumination wastes energy that we could use to focus on our goals. Sometimes directing our energy is the only aspect of recovery that we can control, and our only way forward is to work toward previously set goals or to be motivated by the event to create new ones.

Application:
The grief recovery example I’ve used is a monumental and extremely difficult use of the W2W Hack. Start small. Think of what annoys you most. Maybe you get peeved when your spouse runs the washing machine when you are in the shower, dousing you with ice water. Maybe you’re prone to road rage. Maybe, like me, TV commercials showing sick children or abused animals make you feel hopeless; you don’t have to fall in line with the advertiser’s goal and contribute money to get rid of the negative emotion. Try the W2W Hack instead. Close your checkbook, redirect your cognitive horsepower, and volunteer your time, talk to others about how to help, or incorporate the cause into other meaningful goals such as educational or career plans. Do anything that leads to goal progress, which will make you feel good.

However you apply the Hack, it’s crucial to direct your focus away from the emotion and toward a productive outcome. To cope, you must affirm to yourself that you can influence your environment. If you doubt that you can bring about the life outcomes you want, you will be more easily sucked under by the dark tides of emotion. Worry and stress come out of familiar, stereotypical patterns of coping that are easy and require little conscious though. Avoid reactionary indulgence in the form of excessive eating, drinking, substance abuse, or other vices by directing conscious, focused effort toward productive goals. Adaptation takes work. Despair will linger unless your intentional actions produce change and achieve your goals. Remember what you value, and use the Hacks to get what you want.