“The Opposite” is an episode of Seinfeld in which George Costanza finally catches a break. Figuring his instincts have continually lead him to make bad choices, George tries doing the opposite of everything he would normally do and finds tremendous success in the process. He gets a job with the New York Yankees, moves out of his parents’ house, starts dating again, and experiences many other benefits as a result of ignoring his instincts. Despite his success in this episode, he abandoned this technique later on and went back to getting sub-par results.
In one part of this video, Jason Alexander (the actor who played George) says that he knows people who have benefited from doing the opposite of what their instincts tell them to do. I’m not usually one to take advice from sitcoms, but I think there is some real value here. After all, my life has gotten much better ever since I started changing a lot of my habits and routines. I haven’t ignored all of my instincts, especially since some of them have changed as I’ve practiced what I’ve been learning. However, much of my success has come from doing the opposite of what I’ve done for most of my life.
Even though I haven’t regularly watched TV in years, I used to watch a lot of Seinfeld as it was one of my favorite shows. I recently went back to watching some clips from the show on YouTube, and that’s when I started thinking about “The Opposite”. Seinfeld isn’t as popular as it was during its original run, but it still has a lot of fans that should remember George’s approach in this episode and might benefit from trying some variation of it. I try to keep this in mind whenever I’m in a challenging situation and it’s worked pretty well for me. I think it’s worth a try if you’re not where you want to be in life, and you can always try something else if it doesn’t work for you.