Harnessing negative energy to my advantage

Recently an acquaintance made a joke that made me uncomfortable. The joke was crude and uncalled for. It created a lasting negative impact on me (ie. the joke keeps popping into my mind, making me feel bad about myself). While I eventually came to accept that shit happens and I have to go on with my life, this incident made me think about how I can use this as an opportunity for growth — would it be possible at all to harness all these negative energy that’s adversarial to me to my advantage? I found a few examples in real life and thought about how these can be applied to my life and the pursuit of my goals.

• Sailing ships: For hundreds of years, sailing ships traveled around the world by harnessing energy from wind by skillful maneuver of sails. Even when facing a headwind, they found a way to sail frontward, although not straightly toward the wind. The technique is called “tacking” or “beating”, with which the ship sails zig zag at an angle toward the headwind. The sails are positioned to take in the wind and create a lift (similar to how airplane wings work) that moves the ship forward. This reminded me of “pivoting” that a lot of startups do to find a better angle for them to create impact by shifting their main focus from what they initially embarked on to what they can do the best. It also gave me an idea that I might want to avoid going head to head with the challenges directly and rather to find alternate angles, approaches or pespectives to look at the problems and attempt to solve them.
• Airplanes: As mentioned in the previous bullet point, airplanes actually need the resistence from the air mass in order to make the flight happen. Planes run fast on the runway to create this necessary resistence, and once the desired amount of resistence is reached, they utilize the wings to create lift on which they rinde on and fly upwards. Applying this metaphor to our day-to-day life situations, we need bigger challenges if we want to go to the next level and we’ll also have to create those challenges by creating momentum in whatever endeavors that we are on.
• Wind-turbine power plants: Simliar to the previous examples but this time it shows how the headwind can create energy that can be stored for later. For our day-to-day life situations, generating motivation from the challenges we face and storing them in our reserve of motivation came to my mind.
• Judo: One of its principles is “Ju yoku go o seisu (柔よく剛を制す: softness controlls hardness)”. “Ju” in “Judo” means softness. Unlike other martial arts, it emphasizes using an opponent’s force or momentum against them as opposed to meeting strength with strength. Witty comebacks that get rude people to taste their own medicine. Salient rebuttal in debates that corner the opponent into a logical dead-end.

Arnold Toynbee, a British historian, summarized the essence of human history as follows:

“The challenge of the environment, whether natural or human, is what stimluates a society to adapt, innovate, and grow. Societies progress not in periods of ease but in response to difficulty”

Even though it’s quite stressful to deal with the challenges at work and in personal life, I should remind myself that I actually need these challenges and hardship for me to adapt, innovate, and grow. I will be like a ship pivoting left and right to find better angles, like a plane that soars above the headwind, like a power plants that stores energy from the adversarial force, and like a judo-ka who skillfully utilizes the opponent’s momentum and pounces them onto the mat. Game on!