Positivity

Negativity is something we’re all warned against. We’re told to be optimists, to see opportunities where others don’t, but we’re not always taught how. Turns out, it has a lot to do with discipline (something I need to work on).

Lately, I’ve been obsessing over many different kinds of Ted Talks. From neuroscience, to music performance, to becoming a good conversationalist, the thing that unites all these topics is optimism. If you want to get better at using your entire brain, if you want to be a better performer, if you want to get better at talking with people, you have to learn to see opportunities everywhere, and it turns out it only takes a few minutes a day to train your brain that way.

From all these lectures, I’ve gleaned that writing down three things you’re thankful for each day is enough to change the mode of your brain from focusing on failures to discovering opportunities. I’ll give it a try and let you guys know how it goes (among other personal discipline experiments I’ll be trying in the next couple weeks).

For today, here are three things I’m thankful for:

1.  I’m thankful for the ability to find an outlet in writing; whether it be fact or fiction, simply feeling the pen travel across the page is therapy enough.
2. I’m thankful for true friends who are always there, even if you can’t always see them.
3. I’m thankful for God’s perfect timing, or fate or destiny, whatever you’d like to call it. Things have a tendency of happening when they’re supposed to, so I’m thankful they happen when they do, so I can learn from all of it.

That’s it for today. I hope you’ll join me in a few thankful things each day. Share some positivity in the comments!