Positive Thinking

Positive Thinking is actually pretty simple. It is based upon the premise that you really cannot do anything unless you think you can. Because if you don't think you can do something you probably won't try to do it and then no matter what it will never happen.

So, if you believe you can't do anything then you can't do anything. BUT, if you believe you can do ANYTHING you just might be able to.

So, basically nothing happens in your life unless you first believe and then try.

One of the worst things in regard to this is people who are always telling you you can't do anything. It is really hard to do anything in life while surrounded by people like this unless you are a really strong person and strong willed.

However, then there are people who might not think you can do anything with your life but they don't tell you. Sometimes this is even worse than people putting you down all the time.

So, the best case scenario would be to be around people that encouraged you to live your dreams and yet were people that were sort of realistic about life who had some experience in life but who encouraged you in ways you might succeed.

However, life can be pretty random and so you might have to muster your own will and dreams to make your life happen. Because unless you start making your life happen likely you will never have a life you want to live.

For me, I had very good parents but neither of them had ever been to college. However, my Dad had been to technical night school to become a journeyman Electrician and Electrical Contractor and he was also the valedictorian of his High School Class in 1934. However, his Dad wouldn't allow he and his brothers to go to college even though he paid gladly to send his daughters to college.

So, you wind up with all sorts of things that happen in your life. I found I had to be very strong in my feelings and will to even want to choose to stay alive through some of the things that happened in my life up through about 25 years of age. What saved me in the end was getting married and having a son. Then by age 29 I was a single father. This kept me on the more straight and narrow path so my son would always have a father alive and there to take care of him and to raise him up through college and to always be there for him when he needed as a Dad.

But, positive thinking was a lot of this all along the way. Unless I believed I could do whatever needed to be done I couldn't have done any of it.

So, now I'm 65 and I see that surrounding myself with positive thinking people and educated people has made my life worth living and helped me to help all my children go to college and to move forward in their lives.

When I was young growing up I thought most religious people were crazy. But then I had blunt trauma Childhood epilepsy and had to believe in God just to survive that until I was 15 and my skull grew enough to let the pressure off from a head blow I received around age 9 which likely dented my skull in the back where I fell. So, God got me through all this.

So, then I still thought positive thinking was mostly for crazy people but I also believed in God. I kept seeing people misuse positive thinking in ways that sometimes got them killed. Like believing they would be healed from an illness and not going to doctors: Dead! And this wasn't just one person but was pretty common in the 1950s. So many people believed in God then but not medicine and then they were dead. So, at first I thought positive thinking was a death sentence. But then, I realized that there were people who were realistic about positive thinking and others who were not realistic and this was the whole thing in a nutshell. So, believing you can walk off the edge of the roof and fly and you might die. But, believing you can ride a bicycle just might work. So, it is important to realize which things to be positive about and which ones might get you killed. So, learning to be realistic in your positive thinking is the best thing of all.

There is a joke I like to tell about the seekers of enlightenment who come to the Himalayas from the western world and go to the Cave Yogi and ask, "What is the secret of life?"
And the cave yogi says, "Good Decisions!"
And then the western seekers say, "How do I learn to make Good decisions?"
The Cave Yogi says, "Bad Decisions!"

There you have it! Positive thinking is great but first you have to learn how to make good decisions.


But, there is another side to this. My father once told me, "Just keep making decisions in life and don't worry about them too much. As  a man you are going to have to make decisions every day for the rest of your life so just keep making them. If you get new information then change your decisions as new information becomes available. But, never freak out about decisions just get used to making them and moving forward. People who worry too much about their decisions become drunks or self destruct in all sorts of ways. Just know that decisions have to be made so just make the best ones you can on any given day. NO ones perfect. All you can do is the best you can do. Just make those decisions and move on.