Perspective begins at “I’m lucky to be alive.”
That one sentence changes everything. It transforms us by resetting our expectations and reminding us that this experience and these puzzles that we get to solve are all… upside.
We can choose to do our best to make it count. Or find the many reasons – and there always are many – to pretend like we don’t care.
Choosing to make it count will mean rowing upstream, confronting obstacles, and finding courage in unlikely circumstances. It will mean caring when we’ve been hurt, stepping into the fire when we’ve been burnt, and consistently doing that little bit more than we thought we could. It will also mean dealing with the skeptics and critics – including the one staring at us in the mirror.
And, most of all, it will mean realizing that we never know if a good day is a good day. In the long run, the only thing that will matter is that we chose a direction, kept focus on the process, changed course when necessary and kept plugging away, refusing to be disappointed or shaken in our desire to make things better.
Because it is all upside.
Because we’re lucky to be alive.
