Positive Thinking Works Even When It Fails — By Making You Resourceful | Big Think

I'm passionate about positive thinking from the early books written The Power of Positive Thinking and all the experts in the past. Many of them I knew later on in life; met 'em in different parts of the world. But I apply it because if you study any of the writings and the teachings of positive thinking, you have to have a goal in your mind; otherwise, you're thinking blindly.

You don't walk to a destination without having an idea of where you're going, so positive thinking isn't just thinking to yourself, "Well, I can get anything I want," and so forth, because some things we can't do. I have some people I know personally; I wish they felt they could float if they walked out of an airplane in the sky. No, I'm not being nasty; I'm just being crazy.

But the real positive thinking is having goals because a golfer never hits a ball until he sees where it's going, never hits a ball until he sees where it's going; neither does a pitcher when he throws a ball. So we have to have in our lives some direction. And we have to think with a positiveness that we're going to take advantage of all the opportunities that lead to that direction.

But the interesting thing is when failures take place, and study the lives of famous people, they found alternate routes, which often caused them to invent new machinery, new paraphernalia that didn't work when the other thing failed because they had to be resourceful. The same as you are in a war or when you're playing a game in which you're playing against a team and something goes wrong. Life is really a game, so you have to have a flexibility.

And those things take place not only in knowing in your heart and soul you're going to find a route. You’re going to find the route to this place you want to go whether it's working in a large food complex because you like to cook and what have you, and you savor food, or whether it's working on a sports team or what have you.

But you also have to figure, you know, if this thing doesn't happen, maybe there's something in the background there that I didn't notice that I could take advantage of. In the same way that sometimes, and let's take a lesson from chefs, if they don't have a certain piece, a certain appetizer that's there for that food, there's often a couple of other ones that can be added that turns out can make it a new taste, a new dessert.

And that's the way you have to think about life as a meal that you're adding to...