I’m having a terrible time recovering from last Tuesday’s dental surgery. I was truly the epitome of positive thinking prior to the extraction of my wisdom teeth. I wasn’t worrying about it – I wasn’t expecting it to be awful. Maybe I thought the power of positive thinking would replace the need to take antibiotics post surgery. Maybe I thought positive people don’t experience negative consequences. Maybe I’m an idiot.
Let’s just say that by Friday, the need for antibiotics and painkillers was PAINFULLY obvious!!! The right side of my face is now a top contender for a Michael Douglas look alike contest!
It’s funny how things work – because I can’t say I was feeling amazingly positive when I sat down to my computer. Then, I was greeted with Cath Lawson’s How To Attract Amazingly Positive People post. That was followed by opening an email from a friend on the power of positive thinking.
There were two farmers: a positive farmer and a negative farmer. Whenever it would rain the positive farmer would say, “Thank goodness for the rain – now we don’t even have to water the crops.”
The negative farmer would say, “If this keeps up it will rot their roots and we won’t have any crops to harvest”
The sun would come out and the positive farmer would say, “Thank goodness for the sunshine. Now our crops are getting the vitamins and minerals they really need.”
The negative farmer would say, “If this keeps up it will scorch them and we won’t be able to make a living.”
One day they went hunting together and the positive farmer brought along his new bird dog.
Once they were out in the middle of a lake in a boat, the positive farmer took aim and shot a bird. He then turned to the negative farmer and said, “Watch this.”
The bird dog jumped out of the boat and miraculously ran on top of the water, picked up the bird, turned around and ran back to the boat on top of the water, before setting the bird perfectly in the boat in front of the positive farmer.
The positive farmer looked at the negative farmer and asked, “What do you think?”
The negative farmer shook his head and said, “Just as I thought, that dog can’t even swim.”
It’s up to you today whether you want to be the positive farmer or the negative farmer. You will have that choice. It is up to you what you will get out of life. Like your life and your business – you will only get out of it what you put into it.
They say that lack of fear isn’t courage, it’s insanity. I think the same is true of positive thinking. There’s a difference between purely positive thinking and insanity.
I like to think my life motto is “expect the best, prepare for the worst”. In my case, my expectation for the best meant I failed to prepare for the worst. My failure to prepare for the worst ultimately brought about the worst case scenario.
