You can have everything you possibly want in life and still feel miserable, while you could also have absolutely nothing and be the happiest human alive. How is this even possible? 🤔
There are many possible reasons — one of which is your perspective of the things that happen in your life. Your perspective is simply what you choose to take away from the situations you find yourself in and not necessarily what actually happened. Reality is subjective anyway.
I try to learn something from everyone I have the opportunity to meet and one of the many things I notice that separates successful people from others is how they view their lives and their environment.
Like with anything, there are exceptions. But I’ve noticed that on average, successful people act in ways and say things that show gratitude for the opportunities they have and use that as a drive and leverage to pursue bigger opportunities.
Conversely, unsuccessful people tend to have a victim mindset. They blame others- parents, the government, the weather, bad luck, etc for their perceived lack of opportunities.
Out of all the factors that contribute to people’s successes, we all know that a positive mindset is one of the most important ones. It follows the simple law of attraction. In this article, I show why this is not just some woo-woo crap and also some other benefits of having a gratitude mindset.
With a gratitude mindset, you focus on the infinite opportunities available in all areas of your life. When you are grateful, you focus on the positive things more than the negative things. This focus then attracts more positive things to you.
Gratitude creates an abundance mindset
“If you look at what you have in life, you will always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you will never have enough.” — Oprah Winfrey
An abundance mindset is a belief that there are enough resources and success in the world to share with others. When you are grateful for what you have, you fuel your abundance mindset; which in turn creates more abundance to be grateful about.
Successful people aren’t necessarily luckier, they are just more aware of their lucky breaks. And this helps create more success.
I did an Instagram experiment on this thesis in 2014 called 365 appreciation. Though I failed at the experiment, stopping after 6 months 😏 but the insights I gained from it will always be valuable.
For the challenge, I posted things/situations/people that I was grateful for every day.
What I noticed was that I started attracting more things to be grateful for. People started offering me free things and opportunities that I was then able to post about. Granted, there’s a bit of self-interest on the part of the people reaching out(everyone likes a shout-out). But those opportunities wouldn’t have been available without initially showing that gratitude.
It was the insight from this that I actually used to get people to initially get behind my (now failed) startup.
Initially, it was really challenging to get people to pay attention to what we were doing. Then I started posting our progress on social media heavily, thanking people for their support(that actually didn’t exist …yet 😂). And as predicted, we started getting an overwhelming amount of support with each post. Talk about hacking reality.
Gratitude lets you leverage what you have
“Where focus goes, energy flows” — Tony Robbins
A mentor once told me one of the most important universal concepts I should learn is leverage. Leverage simply means to use something to maximum advantage.
If you are grateful for the things you already have, you will have the awareness and motivation to use them to your maximum advantage.
An example of it was while writing this post. I wrote the draft in the hour I was waiting for a delayed meeting. If I had complained instead of being grateful for that delay, I wouldn’t have been able to leverage that extra time to get this out of my head when the inspiration struck.
What you consider negative about a situation or yourself could be the thing that gives you an unfair advantage to do things that others may not be able to. Having a gratitude mindset allows you to capitalize on it.
Gratitude changes your perspective
“Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.” — Paulo Coelho
How you feel about any situation is all about your perspective. Whenever I feel unmotivated or unlucky, I watch this video to help put things in perspective for me, and it could help you too.
If you have a secure roof over your head, food to eat, and you are in good health, then you are already luckier than the majority of the world’s population.
Once you realize how lucky you are, you will start noticing the opportunities to use this luck around you more.
One afternoon in 2006, while walking down a street in Lagos, I overheard this part of a conversation between a woman who appeared crippled and a blind man:
The woman(while laughing) said: “Ode oshi(you fool)…at least I’m not the one who constantly falls into a gutter.”
The blind man responds: “Sharrap(shut up) your mouth, my friend. It must really pain you to always see where you want to go and not be able to reach there”.
They both agreed with each other and laughed about what just happened.
For some reason this made me smile because both points are valid. But more importantly, because these are two people that should be feeling sorry for themselves, but instead they choose to see the humor in their situation. They both genuinely looked like the happiest people I’ve ever seen. This was one of my first lessons in life on perception.
Whether you perceive a situation to be good or bad is all up to you. And for you to see the good in any situation, you need to have a gratitude mindset towards it. That’s how I turned my shit into sugar.
I find that every success I’ve ever had has been a result of applying the insights from previous failures.
Try to accept every situation you find yourself in life for what it is, and use whatever you have to your maximum advantage.
As the saying goes – When life gives you lemons…
