Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Thought o' the Day - Appreciation

"If you appreciate the sunrise, it will become a more valuable part of your life, and you'll attach more worth to it. If you appreciate your friends, their friendship will go up in value, and it will be worth more to you. If you appreciate your good health, it will become more valuable in your life, and you'll see it as being more important."
- Taken from The Saint, The Surfer and The CEO, by Robin Sharma

If you are like me, you are so fed up with the doom and gloom reporting going on in the media today. Sure, there are major problems facing us individually and collectively as a country. But I definitely detect a Chicken Little "sky is falling" bent to most of the news reports I'm hearing.

So, more than ever, I've been turning off the news and listening/reading things that are uplifting. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to just stick my head in the sand and pretend that problems don't exist. But like Abe Lincoln says, "A man is about as happy as he makes his mind up to be." There's definitely a point where wallowing in negativity and pessimistic news items becomes counterproductive.

Which is why the quote at the top of this post was so meaningful to me. I am re-reading Robin Sharma's masterful book The Saint The Surfer and the CEO. The quote I pulled and shared here with you is really spot-on in so many ways. Sure the economy is in the tank and things are really tight for so many of us. But we can all be thankful that we are rich in ways that have nothing to do with money. Good friends. Good health. A loving God that provides through good times and bad. Now that's something worth appreciating.

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