Our Thoughts Determine Our Fate

“The mind is its own place,” John Milton wrote, “and can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven.” Our thoughts determine our experience of life. We all know people who have plenty of intelligence, personality, social graces, but because they have certain self-defeating habits (i.e. self-defeating thoughts), they never seem to realize their potential. They remain stuck. If you were interviewing two people for a job and one stressed their inadequacy, and the other continually stressed their expectation of success, which person would you hire? Our outer life usually reflects our inner life. Positive thinkers almost always have happier, more fulfilling lives than negative thinkers, even if both attribute it to “fate.”

Positive thoughts increase our courage and our confidence. The great inventor Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.’ That’s an optimistic attitude. That’s an attitude that leads to success. We only fail if we quit. Don’t waste mental energy catastrophizing an unseen future, trying to change people who cannot be changed, or imagining failure. Positive thinking is simply trusting that we always have a chance for our hopes and dreams to be realized, but trusting that even if they aren’t realized today, we are still perfectly all right. We will go confidently into tomorrow.