How People With High Emotional Intelligence Use The "Fortune Cookie Rule" To Become Super Resilient

I think we should start with high school humor and then progress to emotional intelligence.

When I was a teenager, some friends and I used to go to a Chinese restaurant. A girl who was kind of the center of the group and the life of the party (let's call her Jessica) presented us with a "PG-13" joke that you probably know.

That's how it happened. At the end of each meal, we received fortune cookies and read fortunes aloud. Then we would pause and watch Jessica.

With perfect timing, she added the same two words to the end of each fortune: "In bed".

For example, my fortune might read: "Focus, determination, and hard work will always pay off..." And Jessica added: "To bed!"

This made almost all fortunes fun:

"Challenge and adventure await you!" ("In bed.") "Your road to success may be bumpy, but it will also be glorious." ("In bed.") “Everyone knows fear, but not everyone learns bravery. (" In bed. ")

Here we are, decades later, and I can't imagine a fortune cookie without automatically adding the words "in bed".

Okay. Enough about the memory lane. Let's quickly jump to the present and see how people with high emotional intelligence learn to use this trick, which we call the fortune cookie rule, to become especially resilient.

The rule of fortune cookies is to train you to reclassify almost any review or rejection so that it encourages you rather than discourages you (or at least falls into the realm of insignificance) by learning to add simple, silent sentences to in your mind.

I started doing this technique after I detected a pattern in how a significant number of successful people described overcoming initial rejection.

It wasn't the most obvious phenomenon at first. The descriptions always seemed to come in the context of longer discussions, and no one really mentioned emotional intelligence.

Furthermore, these people seemed to apply the technique almost instinctively, or at least without putting a name to what they were doing.

But whether they called it or not, it was really about emotional intelligence.

Here is an example. Recently, we interviewed bestselling author, James Patterson, for my daily newsletter on Understandably.com.

A small part of our extensive discussion focused on how Patterson reacted to the 31 rejections he received before his first novel was finally accepted.

In short, as Patterson described it, he learned not to hear, "rejection." Instead, he always heard, "This one doesn't suit me, but maybe the next one."

Another example: Brian Acton is a multi-billionaire and the former co-founder of WhatsApp. In 2009, he was a successful programmer who kept getting turned down for high-profile jobs and documenting his rejections on Twitter.

Examples:

And then:

Every account is so happy. What led him to accept them and find the bright side? It's partly a matter of trust, but also of context: you just have to learn to see the rejection as if there is obviously another unspoken part that will explain it in a positive or neutral way.

Let me add just one more example, since I'm familiar with the rule of 3.

How about Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, who has already shared verbatim some of the no-thank-you emails he and his co-founders received after being introduced to investors the hottest in Silicon Valley:< /p> Investor #1: