“The only disability in life is a bad attitude.” – Scott Hamilton
Attitude is so important. It is probably the most important thing worth talking about in all the self-help material you will come across. Why; because attitude controls your mind which controls everything. It’s what makes the difference between a good athlete and a poor one; a successful entrepreneur or a failure; a great artist/musician and a poor one. Hamilton, our author today was no stranger to disability; he was two years old when he contracted a mysterious illness that caused him to stop growing. He was misdiagnosed as having cystic fibrosis and was told by doctors at one point that he had 6 months to live. Diet and exercise cured the problem though Hamilton achieved only a height of 5 feet 2 inches in his lifetime. He didn’t allow disability to stop him. In 1981 ’82 and ’83 Scott Hamilton won the gold medal in the World Figure Skating Championships and won the gold medal at the 1984 Winter Olympics.
But Hamilton is not the only example of men and women overcoming great obstacles in their lives. There is Helen Keller, blind and deaf from a very young age; President Abraham Lincoln who rose from being a bare-foot poor boy from Missouri to becoming a self-taught layer who eventually became our 16th President of the United States. The list goes on and on of people defeating the odds against them armed with simply a good attitude. A bad attitude can stop any man or woman’s dream.
What is the secret to attaining the great attitude we talk so much about? Art Link’s letter said it this way: “Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out.” That is the magic formula and nothing more or less.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned from a wheelchair and won the Presidential election in 1933. He served an unprecedented 4 terms in office from 1933-1945 serving as a handicapped person serving through some of the toughest times our country has ever seen including the great depression and the 2nd world war.
Hamilton is right when he says the only disability is a bad attitude. A bad attitude can prevent you from getting a job by acting poorly on a job interview, it can break up marriages and drive a person to use street drugs or become chemically Dependant. A bad attitude can keep a beaten housewife to stay with her brutal husband till he finally beats her to death; it can keep us all imprisoned to our own bonds of self-limitation if we allow it. It makes us all make bad choices in life which lead to nowhere and can make us penniless pawns of society. Having a bad attitude has a bad ending in store for all who choose that road of self-indulgence and self-pity which is where a bad attitude always leads in the end.
It is best to make the best of your life, whatever the cards are that you were dealt, and put a smile on your face and brave the day, each and every new day. Greet it with a good attitude and watch the difference it makes. Someone once said life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you deal with it. That is why having a good attitude is so important. Having a good attitude empowers you and when you are empowered you can empower others you meet. Today give it a try and put on that mask of a good attitude. Yes, that’s right, sometimes you will have to fake it till you make but in the long run, you will see that having a good attitude will get easier and easier until it comes as second nature to you. Today be empowered and decide to face your day with a good attitude!
