Rules of Thinking, The

RULE 18

Think yourself happy

We all know people whose default setting is cheerful. It’s not that their lives are any better on paper than anyone else’s. It’s all about their attitude. Indeed if you go to some of the poorest or most war-ravaged places in the world, you’ll still be able to find people who are positive despite everything. If they can do it, why can’t we?

The answer to this is that being positive is not about our circumstances, it’s about the way we think. Of course, the most positive people have moments when they don’t feel very cheerful, but they still cope better than they would without their positive attitude. I’ve seen several elderly people lose their husbands or wives after decades of marriage, which is always horribly ...