Your Attitude Belongs To You

And it may be the most important thing that matters.

Once, there was a man who made a living by selling balloons at a fair. He had all the colors, there were red, yellow, blue, green, white, and purple.

Whenever he thinks that his business was slow, he would release a helium-filled balloon into the air. And when the children saw it go up, their eyes sparkled with excitement. The children would then come up to him and buy a balloon. This made his sales would go up again.

He continued this process every day.

One day, he felt someone tugging at his jacket. He turned around and saw a little boy. Innocently, the boy asked, “If you release a black balloon, would that also fly?”

Moved by the boy’s concern, the man replied with empathy, “Son, it’s not the color of the balloon, it’s what inside that makes it go up.”

This story told a lesson that we all seem to undervalue: it’s what inside that counts. The thing inside us that makes us “go up” is our attitude. Attitude applies to every sphere of life, whether personal and professional life.

A study attributed to Harvard University found that when a person gets a job, 85% of the time it’s because of their attitude, only 15% is because of how smart they are or how many facts and figures they know.

What matters most comes from having well-developed soft skills and only a few percentages come from hard technical skills. But almost all education dollars teach “facts and figures”, rather than “attitude”.

They taught us to “remember” rather than to “learn”. They taught us to focus on what machines and instruments we can create, rather than what can we do better as human beings. This system somehow pulled us to the “superficial”, we are more focused on our goals; we forget that it’s actually our attitude that will affect our goals.

Attitude is contagious

Everything we do comes from our attitude, and not only it will shape us, but it also influences those around us. This is possible because our brains are wirelessly connected to each other through “mirrored-neurons” — which means that we can actually impact other people with our attitude.

Good teachers make students better learners and more willing to achieve something. Good business leaders make good employee retention and sustainable long-term success. Good salespeople make good deals and earn the trust of their customers. And we all know that good friends bring more happiness into our lives than virtually anything else.

If we do good. We will get greatness. We just have to do it repeatably. As Eric Thomas put it, “Greatness is a lot of small things done well.”

And it all starts with our attitude.

Our attitude directs our thoughts, our energy, and most of all, the actions we take.

The glorious thing about our brain is, it’s like a single processor in a computer: it can make a conscious or unconscious decision for happiness. If we’re constantly scanning the world for negatives, then we will have no energy left over for looking for the positive.

The more negative we are, the less able our brains to overcome the challenges we actually have. People with a negative attitude will see nothing but limitations. They are busy looking for opportunities, but they complain of noise when it knocks.

However, if you choose to have a positive attitude, opportunities will always be under your feet. You don’t have to go anywhere. All you need to do is just look inside you.

Someone once approached Blaise Pascal, the famous French philosopher, and said, “If I had your brains, I would be a better person.” Pascal replied, “Be a better person, and you will have my brains.”

Look inside you, and be the best version of you

To look inside means listening to your internal dialogue. It means to be honest with yourself, to discover and acknowledge the gap between what you say, what you want, and what you actually get.

It may be uneasy, and uncomfortable to look inside. It’s real, raw, and unprepared. But it’s your innermost heart.

Seeing deep inside you will reframe how you feel and think, and it will shape you to be the person you really want to be.

Your attitude belongs to you, and only you.

By changing the way you see and appreciate things in a positive way, you create your own happiness. And from that, you can improve on all dimensions of what you might be capable of, and be the best version of you.