Attitude Is Everything

The Art of Success . . . Success is ninety-nine percent mental attitude. It calls for love, joy, optimism, confidence, serenity, poise, faith, courage, cheerfulness, imagination, initiative, tolerance, honesty, humility, patience, and enthusiasm. . . . Success is having the courage to meet failure without being defeated. It is refusing to let present loss interfere with your long-range goal. . . . Success is relative and individual and personal. It is your answer to the problem of making your minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years add up to a great life. ~ Wilfred A. Peterson

Jerry was the kind of guy you love to hate. He was always in a good mood and always had something positive to say. When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, “If I were any better, I would be twins!“

Jerry was a unique restaurant manager because he had several waiters who had followed him around from restaurant to restaurant. The reason the waiters followed Jerry was because of his attitude. He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Jerry was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.

Being curious, one day Mike, who was also in the restaurant industry, went up to Jerry and asked him, “I don’t get it! You can’t be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?” Jerry replied, “Each morning I wake up and say to myself, Jerry, you have two choices today.You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood. I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life.”

“Yeah, right, it’s not that easy,” Mike protested. “Yes it is,” Jerry said. “Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: It’s your choice how you live life.“

Mike reflected on what Jerry said. Soon thereafter, Mike left the restaurant industry to start his own business. They lost touch, but Mike still often thought about Jerry when he made a choice about life instead of reacting to it.

Several years later, Mike heard that Jerry did something silly — he left the back door of the restaurant opened one morning. He was held up at gun point by three armed robbers! While trying to open the safe, his hand, shaking from nervousness, slipped off the combination. The robbers panicked and shot him. Luckily, Jerry was found relatively quickly and was quickly sent to the hospital. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Jerry was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body.

Mike met Jerry about six months after the accident. When Mike asked him how he was, he said, “If I were any better, I’d be twins. Wanna see my scars?” Mike declined to see his wounds, but asked him what had gone through his mind as the robbery took place. “The first thing that went through my mind was that I should have locked the back door,” Jerry replied. “Then, as I lay on the floor, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live, or I could choose to die. I chose to live.”

“Weren’t you scared? Did you lose consciousness?” Mike asked. Jerry continued, “The paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the emergency room and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read, ‘He’s a dead man.‘ I knew I needed to take action.“

“What did you do?” Mike asked. “Well, there was a big, burly nurse shouting questions at me,” said Jerry. “She asked if I was allergic to anything. ‘Yes,‘ I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled, ‘Bullets!’ Over their laughter, I told them, “I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead.“

Jerry lived thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude. We should learn from him that everyday we have the choice to live fully.

Remember this: Each morning when you wake up, you have two choices for the day. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood. Each time something bad happens, you can choose to be a victim or you can choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes complaining, you can choose to accept their complaining or you can point out the positive side of life. Life is all about choices. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. It’s your choice how you live life.

Attitude, after all, is everything.

Attitude is an important part of the foundation upon which we build a productive life. A good attitude produces good results, a fair attitude poor results, a poor attitude poor results. We each shape our own life, and the shape of it is determined largely by our attitude. ~ M. Russell Ballard