ATTITUDE

“Life is 99% attitude and 1% luck.” – Al Bennett

What is your attitude towards life?

The answer I usually get from most people is, “It depends.”

Depends on what?

How you’re feeling that day?

The circumstances that you have had to deal with?

Your unstable mood?

Your attitude is one of the few things in your life that you can control. I used to think that was bullshit and trust me, this is something I still struggle with daily. But when you force yourself to maintain a positive attitude, you typically feel much better. And we both know damn well that you have experienced this.

When I was in college, I used to spend my summers building fences with two awesome men that I consider friends. Each year, I looked forward to heading out to the beautiful Santa Ynez Valley and working with them.

Now as much as I enjoyed that summer job, there were days that flat out sucked. Working outside in extremely hot temperatures and sometimes performing dangerous procedures in order to get the fence right has a tendency to test a man’s will.

And me being me, when I was frustrated or upset I would just bitch and moan about how difficult it was (like a fucking toddler).

At one point, I think the boss had had enough of my whining so he gave me a piece of advice that I will never forget:

“Life is 99% attitude and 1% luck.”

Though I thought it was bullshit at the time, that little piece of advice has stayed with me. And as I have applied it to my life, I have begun to understand what he meant by that statement. As a matter of fact, I would argue that life is more like 100% attitude because having a good attitude tends to bring along more luck.

Even in the shittiest of situations, a positive attitude can help you through.

It can be the determining factor as to whether or not you learn from each experience that you encounter.

It can be the difference between you progressing towards becoming the hero that you want to be or regressing towards being the same person that you have always been, or worse.

Attitude is a choice. A decision. One that you have full control of. And once you accept this as truth, your life (and your luck) will be much better.