Attitude is everything- is it??

“Attitude is everything”. How often have we heard the above cliché (or so we believe it is), from teachers, parents, friends, success cookbooks, management gurus, so on and so forth? Remember that forward, which said that “attitude” is the only word in English the sum of whose alphabets’ position values adds up to 100?

Bah, you say, or most of us do, another one of those pseudo-intellectual discussions which lead to nowhere, how does attitude help me get rid of my problematic boss? Or my griping about being made to slave and being paid peanuts, relatively speaking? Or my girlfriend who never seems to understand my point of view? Or my potential in-laws who seem hell bent on marrying their daughter off to any Tom, Dick or Harry in this universe but me?

Well, the fact is that attitude, or for that matter, nothing will rid us of the above problems. Nothing can, because more often than not, its us where the problems start with. Trust me, this is not as part of any success cook-book, but something that I have realized over time.

By now you must be wondering, why this sermon, that too from someone who cannot lay claim to any level of success apart from somehow getting into a premier B-school and managing to come out of it unscathed? Well the fact of the matter is somehow I have been made to think a bit of late, due to whatever reasons, and just wanted to share my thoughts with whoever reads this. I wont deny it, I was reading this book “You can win” by Shiv Khera, and while I have no intention of promoting the book in this forum (no, I am not getting paid by him nor is he offering the hand of his beautiful daughter to me in marriage!), the first chapter itself set me thinking, and thus, by extension, typing this.

There is no success cook-book, no guarantee of instant success, if there would be then life would be so much easier. But the fact is that when you read such a book, you get to spend some time with yourself, and some times, also open some closed windows of our minds. Yeah, we interact a lot with people throughout the day, but with ourselves? No we don’t usually do that. Interacting with yourself, this guy must be a loony bin, you must be thinking! Well, what I mean by that is we all live with certain prejudices, and that includes a certain notion about ourselves, which sometimes makes it difficult to judge ourselves impartially.

But it helps, from time-to-time, to have these conversations with ourselves, where we are honest and where we try and open the windows of our minds. It helps us to know ourselves better, and trust me, I have realized, a lot of issues we create are because of the way we think, and if a little bit of change in that helps making our lives better and more successful, then why not?

Don’t know if this will help me, yet to find that out, don’t even know if I can sustain this looking inward thing, but would be glad to know anyone’s comments on this.

Cheers!