On a construction site in the Midwest, when the lunch whistle
blew, all the workers would sit down together to eat. And with singular
regularity Sam would open his lunch pail and start to complain. “Not peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
again!” Sam moaned about his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches day after day
after day. Weekes passed, and the other workers were getting irritated by his
behavior. Finally another man on the work crew said, “If you hate peanut butter
and jelly so much, why don’t you just tell your old lady to make you something
different?” “What do you mean, my old lady?” Sam replied. “I’m not married. I
make my own sandwiches.”
According to the book “the Way of the Peaceful Warrior”, every
predicament of your life has been arranged by you, consciously or unconsciously,
and it is better for you to take responsibility for your life as soon as
possible, instead of complaining and blaming everything around you. If there is
an aspect of your life that you don’t like, (it can be your health, your body,
your grades, or your personal life) you need to find your own path on how to
make it “better”, or just accept it the way it is. If you are aiming for success, there
is a large number of important things such as creativity, focus, push, persistence,
hard work and practice, which undoubtedly lead to it. However, here
I’m going to focus only on such powerful aspect of a personal character as
positive thinking because it can significantly affect your reality.
When I went to school in Kazakhstan, we used to have one
“Health week” per semester. Usually on those “Health” weeks, we had seminars
about HIV, suicide and depression, eating disorders, etc. None of these
seminars included “healthy” topics; they were mostly outlined on negative
things because the majority says that the absence of illness is health.
Similarly, most of us think that we need to succeed first in order to be happy.
We say “I have a good job, now I need a better one, only then I can be happy”.
I believe we need to reverse such way of thinking just because if we don’t
succeed we suffer, and in case we succeed, we set another goal; even if we
finally get what we want, we still suffer because we can’t hold onto it
forever. However, if we try to reverse
our “success formula” and try to think positively, our performance will
significantly improve. It is important
to think positively because more than 80% of your work outcome depends on your
optimism level and on your ability of considering stress as a challenge, not as
a threat; only 10-20% is based on your IQ. So how do we start thinking positively? If we
start writing at least 2-3 things for which we are grateful, if we start making
random acts of kindness, and if we meditate for at least 15 min a day (it was
proven that meditation helps people to overcome depression and stress) we can
easily turn it into a habit. Positive actions and thoughts will help you to
achieve your goals faster.
Here is, by the way, a good video about "implanting habits", or how to start a change with a tiny habit and be awesome!!!
One of the seven habits of highly-effective people, according
to Stephen Covey, is to begin with the end in mind. I think the power of
positive visualization helps you to succeed in any beginning. When I was a
child I kept visualizing a lot about me going to America. Its best educational
system attracted me a lot, and I made a lot of drawings about my future life in
America. Of course, I worked hard to get a scholarship, but I guess my power of
visualization and my passion contributed a lot to my success. Like Steve Jobs
used to say, that if there is no passion for an idea/job/project any rational
person gives up when it gets hard. It is also always helpful to visualize the
prosperity of your business, and it is important to think that it will help
many people, not only you.
