Tiny Toilet Offers Big Results

Blogging, humor, lessons learned, Teaching and Education 1 Minute

Hat tip to Dan Pink for this week’s blog post.

In this week’s Pinkcast, Dan shares an idea that can help us to maximize the benefits associated with mistakes. While we can often learn from our mistakes, it is just as important to be able to move on from them, to put them behind us. However, many people have trouble with this.

So Dan shares some advice he picked up from reading Olympic softball player Jennie Finch’s book: Throw Like a Girl.

In the book, Jennie shares a story where the team she was playing for hired a sports psychologist. One of the techniques used by the sports psychologist was placing a tiny toilet in the dugout.

Whenever a player would strike out, make a fielding error, or throw a bad pitch, or any number of mistakes,  she came back to the dugout and go over to the tiny toilet and flush it, to symbolize the flushing away of the mistake. Apparently, Jennie Finch found this quite effective, and it’s hard to argue with the success she has had.

Dan suggests getting a tiny toilet and placing it on your desk, so that the next time you make a mistake, just flush it away.

And just like Dan does at the end of his video, if you find reading this post to have been a mistake, well now you can just flush it away with your tiny toilet.

But a warning is in order; reading too many of my blog posts could cause your tiny toilet to get backed up.

Pinkcast 4.12: This is how a tiny toilet can help you move beyond your screwups | Daniel H. Pink

*image from Etsy

Published by Jim Borden

A 60-something guy trying to figure out the world, and his place in it. Happily married for 40-plus years, three wonderful sons. Accounting teacher, fitness enthusiast, blogger, reader.

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54 thoughts on “Tiny Toilet Offers Big Results”

  12. Visualizing getting rid of one’s anger, fear or mistakes this way (or other way involving running water) is a great concept and one I believe it can work.

    I read a similar paragraph in one of Tess Gerritsen’s novels, a way for her main character to rid herself of anguish by taking a shower (nothing descriptive), and I thought it was an excellent use of imagery.

    Although… the scene with Victor and a Tiny Toilet from ‘Despicable Me’ springs to mind. 🙂

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  15. What I’ve been needing all my life. My life has been riddled with mistakes, some of which bugged me almost being a disability, harnessing all my creative powers, laying me low for days, years…. If I’d just had the tiny plastic toilet. 🙂

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