By Henrylito D. Tacio

One day, a lady who lived in town looked out of her window and saw a big truck pull up to her house. Out jumped five men and commenced unloading electric guitars and loudspeakers and drums. They took them into the neighboring house.

The woman was furious. Now, her night’s rest and her ears and her life would be ruined by all the noise that would come from the house.

Her husband came home from work and she started to scream at him. “We’ve got to move away from here or else we’ll go deaf and mad with that string band next door.”

But he calmed her down a bit and said, “Honey, why are you angry? Don’t you realize who those musicians are? They are the famous band that plays overseas to large crowds. We should be glad they are here: we’ll be getting all this famous music for free.”

His wife’s frown turned into a smile. She ran to the telephone and began to call her friends to come over sometime and take advantage of the presence of the famous band.

The dictionary defines attitude as “a settled way of thinking or feeling about someone or something, typically one that is reflected in a person’s behavior.”

“Our attitudes, whether negative, positive or somewhere in between, affect every aspect of our lives from how we view the world to how we show up at work, in our relationships and most importantly, for ourselves,” writes Marie-Josée Kelly,  a freelance writer and editor.

Famous men and women from all over the world have something to say about attitude. Dale Carnegie said, “Take charge of your attitude. Don’t let someone else choose it for you.” The famous author Amy Tan also said, “If you can’t change your fate, change your attitude.”

Michael Jordan disclosed, “My attitude is that if you push me towards something that you think is a weakness, then I will turn that perceived weakness into a strength.” To which Henry Ford added, “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”

Alfred Armand Montapert has a precise observation: “We cannot choose the things that will happen to us. But we can choose the attitude we will take toward anything that happens. Success or failure depends on your attitude.”

Will Hurd agrees. “Life is hard,” he says. “Life is difficult. Life is going to punch you in the gut. But when you change your attitude, you change your behavior. When your behavior changes, so do your results.”

Whether you’re happy or lonely, it all boils down to attitude. “Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, and than what people do or say. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill,” says W.C. Fields.

We are convinced that life is 10% what happens to us and 90% of how we react to it. “Happiness is an attitude,” Francesca Reigler states. “We either make ourselves miserable, or happy and strong. The amount of work is the same.”

There was a poor widow who had two sons. This widow’s livelihood depended entirely upon her two sons’ meager little businesses because she was so weak and frail. Every day, she worried about their businesses. She fretted and hoped that they would do well.

One son sold umbrellas. So, the mother would wake up in the morning and the first thing she would do was to see if the sun was shining or if it looked like rain. If it was dark and cloudy, she would gleefully say, “Oh, he will surely sell umbrellas today!” But if the sun was
shining, she would be miserable all day, because she feared that nobody would buy her son’s umbrellas.

The widow’s other son sold fans. Every morning, the poor old widow would arise and look to the skies.  If the sun was hidden and it looked like a rainy day, she would get very depressed and moan, “Nobody’s going to buy my son’s fans today.”

No matter what the weather was, this poor old widow had something to fret about. If the sun was shining, she felt terrible because nobody would buy her son’s umbrellas. If the sun was not shining and it was cloudy, she also felt terrible, because nobody would buy her other son’s fans. With such an attitude, she was bound to lose.

One day, she ran into a friend and told her, “Why, you’ve got it all wrong, my dear. There’s no way you can lose. If the sun is shining, people will buy fans; if it rains, they’ll buy umbrellas. You live off both of your sons. You cannot lose!”

There are always two sides of a coin. And it is up to you how you look at it. Frederick L. Collins has the same view when he said, “There are two types of people – those who come into a room and say, ‘Well, here I am!’ and those who come in and say, ‘Ah, there you are.’”

Positive attitude is better than a negative attitude. In fact, it is every bit as important to success as talent. Never say negative words or you may eat them later on. “The phonograph is not of any commercial value,” a great inventor once said.  “The radio craze will die out in time,” he stated on another occasion. The speaker was Thomas Alva Edison.

Describing the telephone, American president Rutherford B. Hayes said, “That’s an amazing invention. But who would ever want to use one of them?”  Wilbur Wright, to his brother Orville after a disappointing flying experiment in 1901, deplored, “Man won’t fly for a thousand years.”

Pierre Pachet, physiology professor at France’s Toulouse University, said in 1872: “Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.”
But what may be the best of all is this one: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” That genius was Charles H. Duell, commissioner of the United States Patent Office, speaking in1899.

So, take a closer look at your attitude now. Count your blessings. See the brighter side.  As an ancient Persian saying goes, “I had the blues because I had no shoes until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet.”

“If you want small changes in your life, work on your attitude. But if you want big and primary changes, work on your paradigm.” – Stephen Covey