Monday Motivation 2/7/2000

A man I know is 93 years old, still spry, and still coherent. I asked him one day what his secret was.

"Keep Smiling," he said.

Smiling? Keep Smiling? I was expecting some giant health secret that I could use to make a million dollars...when my wife saw him at the health food store, I anxiously quizzed her about what Joe was buying.

But, after this week, I think Joe might have given me the secret in that one small sentence.

In the last week, you may have noticed a news report that stated that optimistic people live longer than pessimistic ones. That shouldn't surprise anyone, really.

Optimists have more hope for the future, and so they tend to work more to make sure they're around to see it. They watch their weight, they exercise, they enjoy the day...each day. They see the good in people and in themselves.

Name me one thing that a pessimist ever did to make the world a better place.

Pessimists don't build the world's nations. They don't build businesses. They don't take care of the poor. They don't even take care of themselves.

Believing in the worst is a difficult position to take. You're always taking the wrong side in matters. Pessimists are the people who bought the generators for Y2K. Optimists are the ones who sold the generators to them. Sure...you've got to prepare for the unexpected...you can't be blindly optimistic all of the time. But you can't go through life expecting the sky to fall. The person who waits each day for Death to take him is never prepared for the day when Death actually knocks on his door. The person who lives his life every day, and expects to live forever is likely to live a great deal longer, and enjoy his life a great deal more.

How do we form a Positive Outlook? Earl Nightingale said it this way (I'm paraphrasing) "A person tends to become what he thinks about most of the time." We have to force ourselves to think positively until it becomes a habit. Negative thinking is itself a habit. A bad habit.

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