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The Most Critical Thing We Can Do With Anger is This — Discard Quickly
Anger does nothing for you
It’s a trivial circumstance compared to everything else going on in the world, but for the first time in a long time, something happened at work today that made me really angry.
The kind of anger that makes you want to scream.
Someone else did something and… it wasn’t the right thing. It was short-sighted, it caused chaos, and now cleaning up the mess is going to take unnecessary time away from me and other people.
The anger swirled in my head for longer than I’ve let it in a long time.
And now that I’m on the other side, I’m more convinced than ever that the most important thing we can do with anger is this: control it, distill it, and quickly discard it.
Anger identifies problems but doesn’t solve them
I say “quickly discard” because I don’t believe anger is a useful emotion.
Anger does one good thing: It alerts you to a problem.
It shows you when something might be wrong— an injustice, an imbalance, an unmet need.
That’s the valuable takeaway from a surge of anger — something is wrong here.
