If you found out you had six months to live, forget what you'd do--how would you feel? Crushed, beaten, hopeless? Or content and at peace? It depends on the weight of your regrets vs. the amount of success you've had, right? Wrong. It's your perspective that decides.
You can focus on everything you didn't get to do, or you can focus on everything you did get to do. You can sit and pine over all those closed doors, all those broken intentions, all those dreams going up in smoke, or you can look back on your life and count your blessings, your joys, the things you did accomplish. "I never got to" or "At least I got to." The latter will make you happier, and that kind of thinking makes it easier to accept any kind of disappointment. It's not so much glass half-empty vs glass half-full, but more about feeling grateful rather than stressing over what you can't control.
You're going to be happiest focussing on what is still there and forgetting about what can never be. You're going to be the most miserable if you look at only what is lost and forget what you did have.
Realists would say to look at the big picture, all of it together, but that gives control to the circumstances, the lists, rather than to you. What if the bad list is longer? If the two lists are the same, you wind up somewhere between happy and sad. But if you burn the bad list, you're left with nothing but happy.
I never got to go to India.
I never got to go to India, but I got to go to France.
I got to go to France!
Which one would make you feel happiest to say? What would you be happiest to hear from a friend?
You can focus on everything you didn't get to do, or you can focus on everything you did get to do. You can sit and pine over all those closed doors, all those broken intentions, all those dreams going up in smoke, or you can look back on your life and count your blessings, your joys, the things you did accomplish. "I never got to" or "At least I got to." The latter will make you happier, and that kind of thinking makes it easier to accept any kind of disappointment. It's not so much glass half-empty vs glass half-full, but more about feeling grateful rather than stressing over what you can't control.
You're going to be happiest focussing on what is still there and forgetting about what can never be. You're going to be the most miserable if you look at only what is lost and forget what you did have.
Realists would say to look at the big picture, all of it together, but that gives control to the circumstances, the lists, rather than to you. What if the bad list is longer? If the two lists are the same, you wind up somewhere between happy and sad. But if you burn the bad list, you're left with nothing but happy.
I never got to go to India.
I never got to go to India, but I got to go to France.
I got to go to France!
Which one would make you feel happiest to say? What would you be happiest to hear from a friend?
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