Over the course of about 60 minutes, we’re going to lay the foundation for successful thinking. The only thing I want you to try to keep in mind is this:
Using any one of these ideas on a regular basis will dramatically increase your ability to choose your life.
Starting with very little, these concepts enabled me to create the exact life I wanted from the ground up… and the best part is the more often I used these ideas, the more effective they became.
So, where do we start? How do we begin the process of “pulling the weeds” from our mind; begin shifting our focus from counterproductive thoughts and actions to productive thoughts and actions?
Well, many years ago a brilliant man drew millions of people’s attention to what he called the “magic word.” That man was Earl Nightingale, and that magic word was: ATTITUDE.
As simple as it may sound, it really does begin with our attitude. People who start with a healthy attitude have an enormous advantage in their life. But why is that?
Well, there’s a lot of reasons, but the one that I think is most important is this: It’s just easier to take use value from any situation, (whether it’s good or bad,) when you’ve got a good attitude. Having a good attitude means you’re not easily frustrated by circumstances…it’s getting yourself to a point where you can accept that everything, whether you like it or not, is just part of the process…it’s YOUR JOB to figure out how to use the current situation to your advantage in some way.
When you get to that point, when you’ve developed that kind of healthy attitude, you can pull some kind of profit out of almost anything. …even if it’s just a hard lesson…It took me a long time and plenty of mistakes before I realized that “hard lessons” actually had value if I’d just take the time to see it that way. I wish I’d looked at it that way earlier, because if I would’ve, it would’ve saved me the aggravation of re-learning a lot of hard lessons.
But what about having a good attitude? What’s the real problem with that being an important part of successful thinking? …The simple fact that most people don’t know how to have a good attitude. The fact that most don’t understand that they (not the world around them) are the ones who’ve got to make it happen.
Our attitude is our responsibility. Think of it as clothing…something that you must choose to put on. If you’re just waiting to see what the world has to offer before choosing your attitude, you’re letting others dress you. What do you think the chances are that you’re going to like what you end up wearing for the day?
All you have to do is turn on one of the cable news channels in the morning. There, you’ll start the day with the perfect ingredients for a terrible outfit….a bad attitude in other words. And sadly, that’s the aim of their programming. It’s designed to be divisive and upsetting. They generate more ratings that way, and whether it’s good for us or not is completely irrelevant.
We’ve got to keep in mind if our attitude is a blank slate going into that, things aren’t going to turn out very well for us.
And that’s just a small part of it. We’ve got our work, our debts, our goals, relationships, family responsibilities…there’s a lot for us to deal with. And if we’re not careful, it’s very easy to fall into a self-defeating cycle or a bad “habit” of perpetual bad attitude.
So, with all this going on, how do we set and keep a genuinely good attitude? …not just for our own good, but for the good of everyone else we come in contact with?
As important as the word “Attitude” is, there’s another word that’s even a little bit more important. One word, that if we LEARN IT, and we learn to make it a part of our lives, NOTHING will be able to throw us off course for very long. That one word is: Gratitude.
Until we learn (and we DO have to LEARN how to do this in our culture) until we learn to recognize and be grateful for the things we ALREADY have, our attitudes barely have a chance. If we develop a habit of becoming “wrapped up” in what we don’t have, we simultaneously develop a habit of ignoring everything that we do…everything that we CAN use in some way to get us where we’re trying to go.
There are many down sides to being ungrateful, but the easiest one to see is this: The less grateful a person is, the less happy they will be.
If I said to you next Thursday, you’ve got two options:
Options 1 is, you can spend the entire day happy and grateful to be alive, or
Option 2 is, you can spend the entire day frustrated and ungrateful.
Would you have a hard time choosing an option? Who would rather be frustrated and ungrateful all day long? …well, apparently most of us!
Because, rather than choosing to recognize what we do have going for us, all of our attention tends to go towards what we DON’T have going for us. And that’s a very expensive habit for us to get into.
First, it costs us a good amount of happiness that we could otherwise be experiencing. Second, it replaces that happiness with stress and frustration that we don’t need. Third, by not seeing the value in what we have, we weaken our ability to use those resources. And last but not least, the effect on our attitude is devastating. By the end of this cycle, rather than increase our ability to change the circumstances we’re unhappy with, we’ve only increased our ability to perpetuate them.
Now, this is where some get confused. They think I’m suggesting that gratitude means never wanting anything more from life. Humbly accepting what you have as enough, and politely speaking the words “thank you” as often as possible. That’s not at all what I’m suggesting. As a matter of fact, I would consider that suggestion completely wrong.
To paraphrase an old saying: Natures’ gift to us was more talent and opportunity than we could ever exhaust in our lifetime…our gift back to nature is to do the most we can with that talent and opportunity.
Everything that’s living seeks to become more and we’re no different, but unlike everything else, we have an extraordinary ability to do so.
To make FULL USE of our lives…now THAT’S gratitude.
-To waste our chance, to waste our opportunity to continue becoming more…that is not.
So we’ve covered two of the primary ingredients of successful thinking:
Number one is attitude. We have the ability to choose our attitude and because so, we have the ability to increase the value of every day. A good attitude will open more doors for us, increases our happiness, and reduce our stress, all the while making progress towards what it is that we want easier to come by.
And number two is gratitude. By learning a higher degree of gratitude, we increase our wealth immediately. Everything we’ve taken for granted suddenly shows its value. We can again see how fortunate we truly are…for the small things like the radio you’re listening to this disc on, to the big ones; like our life itself.
Moving forward with a better attitude and greater awareness of what we can use to our advantage, our next step becomes much easier. In chapter 2 we cover the process of building exactly what we want.
