Natsune Oki talks about how to use humor to overcome failures

Hi everyone!

April is a humor month! So in this blog post, I want to talk about “how to use humor productively”

Jeff Bezos has such a nice laugh that invites others to laugh.

Successful people laugh more!?

Being able to laugh is so powerful. Perhaps, Jeff Bezos who I’d imagine has to face a lot of tough problems running one of the biggest world’s businesses in the world, laughs the way he does.

Creating a joke out of failure is perhaps the most powerful thing. In fact, there is a story about Jeff that I shared in the video above. The comment he made after losing hundreds of millions of dollars.

"If you think that's a big failure, we're working on much bigger failures right now. And I am not kidding.”

Joking about failures we made ourselves is such a powerful way not to let the situation dictates us with an overwhelming amount of guilt and negativity.

I talk A LOT about how to deal with negativity and one of the key points I always like to emphasize is not to get overwhelmed by dramatic emotion at any given moment.

We are all emotional animals and we tend to exaggerate our emotions when we face adversity. A.K.A, we start looking at a situation worst than how it actually is.

So the first step is to understand that we should take a negative situation as is, not worst than it is.

Then there is a second step which is to be able to look at the failure with a light-heartedness. Then what this does to our psychology is to help us create a sense of perseverance.

A while back, I recorded a podcast with a Phoenix-based comedian and host of A Comedy Advice Podcast, Stephan

Podcast about how to use humor to make perseverance with Stephan

I asked, Stephan, how can we productively use humor? ( How can we use humor when we face failure and adversity?)

Then we started thinking about what makes people laugh. - The simple answer is that we create connection and empathy through humor. Laughing occurs when there is an imperfection. It is not laughable when someone exposes themselves for how perfect they are. Laughing occurs because, in an imperfect story, there is something relatable to the story from the audience’s perspective. - “Sharing vulnerability.”