It’s been an interesting week. One that has evoked a lot of emotions ranging from celebration to despair. The fact that almost every two-term presidency in the U.S. ends with the other side winning demonstrates our propensity to get too high and too low at exactly the wrong moments.

When I created the AP operating principal of “Keep Moving Forward”, it was inspired by the philosophy of “Next Play” that Jeff Weiner had established at LinkedIn, which he’d borrowed from legendary college basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K).

Coach K is known for yelling out “next play!” after every single play to make sure his team doesn’t linger too long on their successes or failures. In his book, Beyond Basketball, he writes, “Essentially, what it means is that whatever you have just done is not nearly as important as what you are doing right now”.

The LinkedIn team was so inspired by this philosophy, they had T-shirts printed with the “LNKD” ticker symbol on one side and “Next Play” on the other, which employees wore when they rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on the company’s first trading day.

Here is how we define “Keep Moving Forward” at AP:

“We avoid the roller-coaster ride of highs and lows. We celebrate our wins, remain humble and move on to the next challenge. Likewise, we reflect on our failures, adjust and move forward without wondering what might have been.”

While it’s important to learn from the past, we can’t live in it or wallow in it. We need to be using our energy to move ourselves forward with productive solutions. Both hubris and despair are dangerous and counterproductive to our long-term goals. History has also shown that we tend to get overconfident at the top and overly pessimistic at the bottom. The stock market has proven this for centuries.

Jeff’s quote yesterday on LinkedIn put this into perspective nicely. Let’s all resolve to be part of the solution.