I related all this to the young business executive and suggested that the real cause of his unhappy feeling was not that he had lost $200,000, but that he had lost his goal; he had lost his aggressive attitude, and was yielding passively rather than reacting aggressively. “I must have been crazy,” he told me later, “to let you convince me that losing the money was not what was making me unhappy—but I’m awfully glad that you did.” He stopped moaning about his misfortune, “faced about,” got himself another goal—and started working toward it. Within five years he not only had more money than ever
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