It s All in How You Look at It

It's All in How You Look at It

Robert Schimmel didn't think having a heart attack was funny. But he took adversity and tried to find ways to use it as a productive force in his life. When you are faced with a difficult situation, you can let it defeat you or you can make something good from it. You can see all the difficulties when opportunity comes around or you can see all the opportunities in every difficulty.

That reminds me of a story I read about two young boys who grew up in a broken home, abused by an alcoholic father. Eventually, they moved away from home and led separate lives. Years later, they both participated in a study of people who had grown up in alcoholic homes. One of the boys had become a successful businessman who never drank. His brother had grown up to be an alcoholic, now in dire straits. The psychologist who was conducting the study asked each brother why he had ended up the way he did. Each one of them answered, "What else would you expect when you have a father like mine?"

Suffering has two paths. You can let adversity pull you down, or you can use it as a life force to spur you on to greater accomplishments. That doesn't mean that you deny it, or that you need to repress your emotions. You can't look at a tragic event while it is happening and say, "Oh well, I'm sure there's a lesson in here somewhere." Some people bounce back quicker than others. But we all have a choice to make, and it has been proven over and over again that it is not what happens to us in life that counts, but what we choose to do about it.

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake, never made a discovery.

—Samuel Smiles,
writer