Glass Half Empty?

This lesson talks about a common expression people use when describing someone’s outlook. You know the one — is your glass half empty or half full? It’s one of those phrases that’s been repeated so often it’s almost lost its meaning. Almost.

I’m sure you’ve heard this expression before. You already know that it’s used to describe how a pessimist might see a glass as being “half empty” whilst an optimist sees the same glass as being “half full.” The message being that some people take a negative slant and focus on what’s missing, how empty their lives are or could be. Others take a more positive view and tend to focus on what they have, how full their lives are or could be instead.

An underlying theme throughout this course will be that taking a more positive view of the world, by displacing or reframing some of the negative biases and thought processes you have, can be the key to helping you get more clarity and enabling you to be more successful. Simple enough, right?

In the last chapter, the message was about how just a change in perception, or specifically how positively reframing how you perceive something, could change your reality. In this chapter, I want to not only reinforce this point but also use the glass half empty and half full analogy to show you that you might have heard the expression before, but perhaps it’s time to learn how to look a little deeper. Especially if you’re going to get the answers you really need.

So with this in mind, let’s move on to an old Zen or Buddhist parable. The story of the professor and a cup.

A university professor went to visit an old Zen master and was invited to stay for tea. Whilst the Zen master served the professor tea, the professor lectured him about Zen philosophy, trying to impress him with his considerable knowledge.

Quietly, the Zen master started to pour tea into the professor’s cup. He poured, and when the cup was nearly full, he kept pouring. The tea reached the brim of the cup, and then he continued to keep pouring until it started to flow over the sides of the cup and onto the table.

The professor watched the cup overflow. Unable to restrain himself, he exclaimed, “It’s full! No more will go in!”

“You are like this cup,” the master replied. “How can I teach you anything until you first empty your cup?”

Perhaps the message here is that the professor, wanting to learn from the Zen master, could only do so if he emptied his head of all the facts or misconceptions he already had. Perhaps all the Zen master really wanted was to shut the professor up. Or perhaps there’s more to be said about emptiness than you might have first thought.

“We mould clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that makes the vessel useful.” That’s Lao Tzu. Ancient wisdom that still rings true today.

Taoists value emptiness. In both the story and the Lao Tzu quote, we get the message that like a pot needing to be empty before it can be used, a mind also needs to be empty, or at least open, before it can take in any new knowledge. In the patients I see, it’s not only knowledge or misconceptions that’s the problem. Sometimes it’s just the thoughts themselves. The sheer volume of them.

A mind can be too full of thoughts. Positive or negative, doesn’t really matter. The simplest thing many people can do to help themselves is to let go of some of the thoughts that are churning around in their heads constantly. Just let them go.

Having a clear head is essential for maintaining good mental health and gaining clarity of thought. Opening your eyes to new ways of thinking could be the thing that makes the difference. What I really know is that it’s difficult to help anyone with a closed mind. A mind so full of its own ideas that there’s no room for anything new.

I believe that when Tim Ferriss wrote the book Tools of Titans, he found that among the high achievers he interviewed, the great majority regularly practised some form of meditative practice. The goal of most forms of meditation is to achieve a single point of focus in an otherwise empty mind. So perhaps being half empty is not such a bad thing after all.

There’s also a story about a therapist working with a client on anxiety and stress. In the middle of a therapy session, the therapist holds up a glass of water in front of her client.

The client smiles, expecting the “are you half full or half empty” question. Instead, the therapist asks, “How heavy is this half-full glass of water?”

The client looks confused. The therapist continues. “The absolute weight doesn’t matter. It depends on how long I hold it. If I hold it for a minute, it’s not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I’ll have an ache in my arm. If I hold it for a day, my arm will feel numb and paralysed. In each case, the weight of the glass doesn’t change. But the longer I hold onto something, the heavier it becomes.”

“The stresses, worries, and pain in your life are like this glass of water,” the therapist continued. “It’s important to remember to let go of your stresses as soon as you can. Let go of everything you don’t need to carry around.”

In this example, it’s all about being able to let things go. So far, I hope you can see that the message in the glass half full and half empty analogy goes a lot deeper than just one of optimism and positivity. Perhaps this is ironic because optimism and positivity can only do so much. There are many other things you need to do in addition to being positive to succeed in life.

Getting back to the paradox of the half-full and half-empty glass, perhaps there are times when emptiness is just as important as fullness. Emptiness can motivate you to want more by making you realise something is missing. At other times, the most important thing is to let go of what you’re holding onto, what might be holding you back.

Another paradoxical response to the full or empty glass could be “It depends on how thirsty you are.” Or possibly, the meaning to the man in the bar would be “Right, who’s getting the next round in?”

A physicist might say that technically the glass is always full because it’s filled with air where it isn’t filled with liquid. Or perhaps the bigger picture could be that at least we have a glass with something in it rather than nothing at all.

I want you to take away from this lesson that sometimes to get what you want, you need to do more than just take a more positive view. You need to open your mind to something new, to some new ideas. Perhaps a few of the ideas from these courses are what you really do need.

The glass half empty and glass half full expression is just a useful way for you to start looking at paradox. It’s about looking at how your perceptions and the meaning you take from situations affect how you feel and the decisions you make. Everything we do and everything we don’t do has consequences. Where we put in the time and effort in our lives means we may be taking that time and energy from one aspect of our lives and giving it to another.

With this in mind, perhaps the last question you really need to be asking yourself is whether you’re truly committed to change. Because the glass can only be half full if the bottle is half empty too.

Let’s think about that for a moment. If you’re filling your glass from a bottle, every drop that goes into your glass comes out of that bottle. You can’t get something from nothing. If you want your life to be fuller in one area, something else has to give. You can’t add hours to your day. You can’t create energy from nowhere. Every choice you make to do something is simultaneously a choice not to do something else.

This isn’t pessimistic. It’s realistic. It’s mathematical. If you want to be healthier, you’ll need to spend time exercising that you’re currently spending doing something else. If you want to learn a new skill, you’ll need to dedicate hours that are currently going elsewhere. If you want better relationships, you’ll need to invest energy that’s probably being consumed by other things right now.

The question isn’t whether you want change. Everyone wants change. The question is whether you’re willing to empty your bottle to fill your glass. Whether you’re willing to let go of what’s comfortable, familiar, and easy in order to gain what’s valuable, meaningful, and worth having.

Sometimes being half empty is exactly where you need to be. Empty enough to be filled with something better. Open enough to receive something new. Light enough to move forward without being weighed down by everything you’re carrying.

But you have to choose it. You have to actively decide what to pour out and what to pour in. Because if you don’t make that choice deliberately, life will make it for you. And I can promise you, life’s choices are rarely the ones you’d make for yourself if you were paying attention.

So here’s my challenge to you. Look at your glass. Is it half full or half empty? More importantly, what’s in it? Is it what you want? Is it what you need? Or is it just what’s always been there because you’ve never thought to empty it out and start fresh?

And what about your bottle? What are you holding onto that’s taking up space, weighing you down, preventing you from pouring in something better? What do you need to let go of to make room for what you actually want?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re the questions that will determine whether you move forward or stay stuck. Whether you grow or stagnate. Whether your life becomes fuller or emptier over time.

The choice, as always, is yours. Ready?

Further reading

Reality Check

The Hopium Epidemic

Introduction: The People Around You

What Is Still Holding You Back

Confirmation Bias

Why Most Approaches to Self-Development Don’t Work

Further reading

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