“Our life is what our thoughts make it.” Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius
It’s vitally important what you think since your mindset and thoughts makes you what you are today and will become in the future.
Writer Napoleon Hill wrote “the biggest problem [or opportunity] you and I have to deal with is choosing the right thoughts.”
Since, your mindset and thinking influences your behavior. You behavior influence your actions. Your actions influence your outcome. Your outcome determines how successful and happy your future will be.
So, be careful of your thoughts, what you feed your mind and how you think because it’s going to affect your behaviors and actions–which will affect you happiness and success in the future.
Hope and a positive mindset
Individuals must master their mindset in order to navigate the opportunities and challenges successfully.
In general we get what we expect in life. Norman Cousins remarked, “The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling. People who fear the worst tend to invite it. Heads that are down can’t scan the horizon for new openings. Bursts of energy do not spring from a spirit of defeat. Ultimately, helplessness leads to hopelessness.”
If your expectations for life are negative, you end up experiencing a lot of negatives. And those negatives are compounded and become especially painful, because negative expectations cause a person not to learn from their losses.
But, you can change your thinking from a negative mindset, in which you feel hopeless, don’t learn from your losses, and are tempted to give up, to a positive mindset, in which you believe things can get better, you learn from your mistakes, and you never quit.
You must renew your hope, change your thinking for the better, and believe that good things can and will happen to you. Doing these things can literally change your life.
Dr. John Maxwell says that if there is hope in the future, there is power in the present. The reason is simple: Hope in the future has a dramatic impact on your thinking today. Your thinking today determines your performance today, and your performance today has a direct bearing on your future.
There is a tale of a salesperson who went to a remote region of the world to sell shoes and reported back to his company that it was impossible to sell shoes there because nobody wore them. His replacement reported back that it was the most exciting market he had ever seen because nobody had shoes.
One salesperson had a positive and hopeful mindset, the other had a negative mindset and no hope. Without hope and the right mindset, there will be no effort or deliberate action.
This fact is true for building wealth over the long term as it is for selling shoes in a rural area. Without a positive mindset and hope for a brighter financial future, there will be no efforts.
Even in the worst of time, it important for you to think positive, courageous thoughts and refuse to let defeat and fear defeat you. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
Bottomline, your peace of mind, the joy you get out of life, and wealth you build depends solely upon your thoughts and mindset. Your opinion of events and thoughts is entirely up to you.
“A man is not hurt so much by what happens, as by his opinion of what happens.” French Philosopher Montaigne
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