Last fall, Shelly wrote an entertaining about Med Student Awesome that was inspired by the Book of Awesome.
The guy who wrote that book is Neil Pasricha, and a few weeks ago I stumbled upon a talk he gave at a TED event:
It’s a fantastic talk and I encourage you to all to watch it. In his talk, Neil shares his 3 A’s to living an awesome life: attitude, awareness and authenticity.
Attitude
While all three of those A’s are important, the idea of attitude has really resonated with me recently. In the past few weeks, I had two of the most off days I had in a long time. By off days, I mean days where so many things go bad that your perspective on life becomes temporarily shifted towards great negativity. Without going into details, I was unhappy and that unhappiness spread to the way I looked at every single thing in my life.
My life is completely awesome and I am super grateful for everything. But when I was unhappy and my attitude was extremely poor, I looked through everything with a telescope of negativity. I began to focus on every negative thing in my life and ignore all the positives. Instead of looking at how much I had accomplished in my research, and I focused only on how much I had left to do. I saw only failure when really it was failure surrounded by success.
Our reality is whatever we perceive it to be. I finally came to the realization that my life was only disappointing because I viewed it through a telescope of disappointment. We have to take the good and the bad, always, and neglect neither. Our attitude in times of both good and bad significantly affects how we react to both success and failure.