Attitude and Success

Having the right attitude has a profound influence on how successful one’s professional and personal life turns out to be. It is the attitude with which you look at life, and the way you face and overcome the many challenges that life throws at you that shapes your graph of success and growth.

For example, if you set out towards a particular long-term goal or begin a short-term task like a college or office assignment, and are immediately bowed down by the enormity or the sheer weight of the work and expectation associated with it, you will realize that the task doesn’t get any easier from where you started out. In fact, you’ll soon realize that it only gets worse. That’s a position you don’t want to put yourself in. Trust me! I have lived through it.

Having the right attitude could mean the difference between coming trumps, and losing out by a whisker. With the competitive world that we live in today, even an iota of extra edge could either make or break your career or put a dampener on your ambitions. Consider it like a 100 meter sprint; even a split second gained or lost means a difference between greatness and the also ran.

So, next time, when you are in doubt about the power of positive thinking, just think of the times you narrowly missed out on something that you wanted badly. Ever imagined, if only you had been more positive and had put in a bit extra, perhaps the result could have been so different.

Positive attitude is not something that you flick on or off like a switch suiting your whims and fancies. It is a state of mind that you get into after proper conditioning, whereby you focus your thought process and channel your positive thinking in the right direction to make the maximum use of one's will power to attain and even surpass your immediate or longer term goals. Just like anything else, it can only be achieved through practice. As Aristotle has famously said, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit."

Also, it is important to remember that attitude is infectious, be it positive or negative. So, make sure you are not negatively impacted by surrounding yourself with negativity and apathy. Having the right attitude can turn challenges into opportunities, obstacles into achievements, liability into assets, and modesty into greatness. If life is a vessel, and success your destiny, then having the right attitude will act as the rudder that steers your course towards success.

Henceforth, whenever you are faced with any responsibility or ambition that seem daunting and insurmountable, make sure to remove all the negativity and pessimism and face up to the task at hand with the right fervor, passion and more importantly, the right attitude. Soon, what seemed as daunting or overwhelming will soon resembles a stroll, and what seemed insurmountable slowly but surely seem clear-cut and even pleasurable.

Positive thinking makes you emotionally strong enough to effectively tackle the dizzying heights of success and withstand the excruciating pinch of failures. It allows you to appreciate the importance of learning from your mistakes and truly comprehend the adage that, as long as something doesn’t kill you, it only makes you stronger. Success is not an everyday affair, so chances are that you encounter days where nothing much happens, and days when the situation seems hopeless.

It is these days that you learn the most as against days of success which are spent more on savoring the joy of attaining a rare feat rather than consolidating and building upon it. Positive thinking allows you this opportunity to progress and improve, while negative thinking pulls you further back in the doldrums from where you began. It gets increasingly harder to emerge from them. So, master your attitude and command success!