Attitude of Success

There is a great power in positive thinking.  Before an athlete comes up to bat he will visualize hitting the ball in order to help him actually do.  We are taught from the time we are younger that we need to believe in ourselves, as though this alone is enough for us to reach whatever goal we may strive for.  There are numerous books on the subject that explain everything from the psychology to the karma to the physics of the issue.

I don’t know how productive positive thing is, but I know how damaging negative thinking is.  It only makes sense.  Imagine that same athlete coming up to the plate with the attitude of Eeyore, “Well I probably won’t hit it anyway, but I guess I’ll go up there.”  Or worse yet, he never even gets up to bat because he’s certain he will strike out.  He has failed before he’s even tried.  Positive thinking may not guarantee success but negative thinking does seem to guarantee failure. 

Perhaps the real strength in positive thinking is that it keeps us going even when we do fail.  A quilter’s best friend is a seam ripper.  This seems to be a universal truth. No matter how good a sewer they are, mistakes will be made sooner or later.  The mark of a good quilter is not the absence of mistakes, but the ability and persistence to fix them.  More than anything else, you can’t give up.

There is a famous quote from Thomas Edison that says, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”  In life we may get up and fail thousands of times, but we only have to succeed once.  That can only happen if we never give up trying.  Perhaps what we were told when we were younger is true, we can do anything if we just believe that one of these times when we get up again we will in fact succeed.