As the title of the book suggests, Attitude is everything, but wait, what is attitude?
This part starts by explaining what exactly attitude means in simple terms, attitude is the window through which you perceive the world. Many events happen in our lives, and we give them meaning based on our previous experiences in life. To understand the importance of a positive attitude better, let’s take the example of this picture:
Here, in this picture, the small boy who stands in 3rd position is much happy than the one who stands in 1st position. Well, this illustrates the power of attitude, in any situation, there are going to be positives and negatives. If you focus on the positive, then you are able to be happy in any situation, If you focus more on the negative then, you would tend to be unhappy. And this is not situational, if you have a negative attitude, no matter how good your life becomes, you will tend to focus on the negative only. So, it is important to develop a positive attitude in life, and a positive outlook in life in all situations.
Have you ever experienced this, some event happened in your life and you were happy about it, then someone came and told you the negative side of the event, and suddenly as you started to think in the same way, you also started feeling sad and felt the event was negative and became unhappy. This is the window, the perspective the author was talking about. In this case, initially, we had a positive outlook, then someone came and gave us a negative outlook and put some dirt on our window, our attitude.
Disclaimer: Having a positive attitude, doesn’t mean, you need to ignore the negative aspects or all negative things. It means, for negative aspects, you believe that you can modify the inputs you put in and get better results.
So, now that we have established that attitude is a window, through which we see the world, we can say that every child starts with a clean widow. To elaborate on the point, when we were kids while learning to walk, we failed so many times, because at that time we were not discouraged by it, since failing didn’t mean anything to us, we just felt it was normal and tried again. So, our windows were clean initially.
As we grow up, we experience life, and our window is tainted by many people, be it our teachers, parents, friends, and other people in the world. Not everyone had bad intentions or wanted bad for us, it’s just that unknowingly, we get affected.
We need to understand that it’s our responsibility to keep our windows clean.
How to clean the window?
One of the ways, I clean my window is by reading this book again and again because as we go in our real life, we tend to go back to our old ways of thinking, and our old attitude. We have been that way all our lives, so we should not expect to be transformed into a new human being in a night, in a read. Reading the book, again and again, helps me look at the problem at hand with a new perspective, and change the way I approach it, to solve it. I think with time, as I continually use these principles, they would be ingrained in me and bring positive change.
Other ways you can clean your window are:
- Sticking the quotes you relate to in the book, or any quotes on positive attitude, at a place where you look every day
- Noting down some principles, that works for you and go through them from time to time
- If you journal, write the quotes in your journal.
- You can record your voice, and the message you want to stick to. And whenever in need just plug in the earphones, and listen to them, revise them.
- Tell about it to a friend who is supportive, who would listen to you and help you improve.
The author explains, that we might feel that the situations were in favor of the author and not much difficult, but he explains that's not the case, by giving a solid example of Viktor Frankl, author of “Man’s Search for Meaning”. During World War II, Frankl was imprisoned in several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, the deadliest concentration camp. So, we can agree that he has been through the most difficult times any human can be through, in all aspects. Frankl quotes:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Even through tough conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food, and various mental stresses may suggest that inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis, it becomes clear that the sort of person, a prisoner becomes was the result of an inner decision and not the result on camp influences.
From this example, we can conclude that we have full control over our window and our attitude.
Summarizing this article, we can say
- Attitude is the window, through which you view outside world
- In daily life, we encounter many events, and sometimes our window gets dirty. So, we need to keep working to clean our window.
- We need to find ways to clean our window, which works for us. Different methods work for different people, find what works for you.
- No matter how difficult the life becomes, we have the power to control our attitude.
I would like to know your takeaways in the comments. Waiting to read your takeaways!