Embrace a crabby complainer today.

The New York Times ran a great column 5/1/07 “The Power of Negative Thinking” by a surgeon talking about how powerful thinking negatively can be.

That kind of thinking is usually frowned upon and, he admits, it would be unhealthy to |”constantly seek out the inadequacies” of your kids, your looks, your skills as you get older. Negative thinkers are grouchy and always dissatisfied. Work with anyone like that?

But in business and schools and other institutions, if don’t push to discover failures – failures go unrecognized. Even when they are everywhere to be seen. He used the example of lousy care to veterans at Walter Reed Hospital. How could something like that go unnoticed?

In contrast, at the same hospital, he said, colleagues didn’t boast about how many soldiers they’d saved from blindness. Instead, they asked a “more unnerving question.” Why were they getting so many eye injuries?

It turned out that young soldiers thought their protective goggles were dorky and not wearing them. The military switched to cooler-looking eyewear and the eye-injury rate fell.