Attitude can put you in life’s ‘fun lane’

If you think your job, your car, your wardrobe and your day-to-day existence are blah, I’d give you 100-to-1 odds that you’ve become pretty blah yourself.
I use the word “become” because you certainly didn’t start life in the blah lane. As a baby, you were probably like most: a curious creature who was easily delighted. How sad it is that delights diminish as dreams die.
Are you willing to endure an unhappy here and now for the promise of harps and harmony in the hereafter? Or would you prefer to have a few cheers while you’re participating in the game of life on this planet?
The great achievers of the civilized world had fun at what they were doing. Michelangelo didn’t lie flat on his back painting religious scenes on the ceiling of Sistine Chapel because he hated his work. He did it because he loved his art and wanted to leave his heritage for the world.
Thomas Edison enjoyed his work so much that he went to bed with a pencil in his hand, extended over a tin cup. When he was deep asleep, the pencil would fall, waking him up so he could start work again.
Edison never gave up on his dreams. He failed with more than 10,000 experiments before he got the filaments to stay lighted in an electric light bulb. But the failures didn’t dissuade him from continuing to try to light up the world. He was having too much fun trying to conduct the one experiment that would make the 10,000 failures unimportant.
He was past age 60 when all his laboratories burned to the ground, the research of his lifetime going up in flames. His comment at the time exemplifies a positive attitude at its best. “Aren’t we lucky,” he said, “to get rid of all those mistakes?”
Such an attitude keeps dreams alive and the blahs at bay. It makes defeat an impossibility and success a probability. Instead of “I can’t,” such an attitude says, “I’ll try.” Instead of “I wish I could,” such an attitude says, “I will.” It’s the only kind of attitude that eventually can happily say, “I did.”
I recently received a letter from a woman who had attended one of my weight sessions three years ago. She sent three pictures – her fat picture, her not-too-bad picture and her slim, smashing picture. Her note repeated the title of my first book, “I Would If I Could and I Can.” Then she added, “And I did!” You, too, can escape the blah syndrome if you keep your dream alive.
Tranz Talkz puts positive emotional power in your life this week:
1. Practice dreaming: decide on the person you’d like to be.
2. Practice visualizing: picture yourself in your chosen role.
3. Practice becoming: Devise a plan of action for making your dream come true.