This is how obstacles become obstacles.
If you hold a perpetually negative outlook, soon enough everything you encounter will seem negative.
Whatever you’re going through, whatever is holding you down or standing in your way, can be turned into a source of strength – by thinking of people other than yourself. You won’t have time to think of your own suffering because there are other people suffering and you’re too focused on them.
There is perhaps no one less at peace than the egomaniac, their mind a swirling miasma of their own grandiosity and insecurity.
Too often we react emotionally, get despondent, and lose our perspective. All that does is turn bad things into really bad things.
Again, the event is the same: Someone messed up. But the evaluation and the outcome are different.
A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness and that to seek it is perversion. – JOHN GRAVES.
Lend a hand to others. Be strong for them, and it will make you stronger.
Do you have a vacation coming up? Are you looking forward to the weekend so you can have some peace and quiet? Maybe, you think, after things settle down or after I get this over with. But how often has that ever actually worked? The Zen meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn coined a famous expression: “Wherever you go, there you are.
Howard Hughes, like so many wealthy people, died in an asylum of his own making.
It’s a little unnatural, I know, to feel gratitude for things we never wanted to happen in the first place. But we know, at this point, the opportunities and benefits that lie within adversities. We know that in overcoming them, we emerge stronger, sharper, empowered. There is little reason to delay these feelings. To begrudgingly acknowledge later that it was for the best, when we could have felt that in advance because it was inevitable.
To one person a situation may be negative. To another, that same situation may be positive. “Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” as Shakespeare put it.
Each would collapse beneath the process. We’ve just wrongly assumed that it has to happen all at once, and we give up at the thought of it. We are A-to-Z thinkers, fretting about A, obsessing over Z, yet forgetting all about B through Y. We.
With one approach you took advantage; with the other you succumbed to anger or fear.
You love it because it’s all fuel. And you don’t just want fuel. You need it. You can’t go anywhere without it. No one or no thing can. So you’re grateful for it.
There is always a countermove, always an escape or a way through, so there is no reason to get worked up. No one said it would be easy and, of course, the stakes are high, but the path is there for those ready to take it.
That is not to say that the good will always outweigh the bad. Or that it comes free and without cost. But there is always some good – even if only barely perceptible at first – contained within the bad. And we can find it and be cheerful because of it.
Think of all the ways that someone could solve a specific problem. No, really think. Give yourself clarity, not sympathy – there’ll be plenty of time for that later. It’s an exercise, which means it takes repetition. The more you try it, the better you get at it. The more skilled you become seeing things for what they are, the more perception will work for you rather than against you.
Shaking off the bad stuff as it happens and soldiering on – staring straight ahead as though nothing has happened.
Most of us are not the president, or even president of a company, but in moving up the ladder in life, the system and work habits that got us where we are won’t necessarily keep us there. When we’re aspiring or small time, we can be idiosyncratic, we can compensate for disorganization with hard work and a little luck. That’s not going to cut it in the majors. In fact, it’ll sink you if you can’t grow up and organize.