The garden needed to be cleaned. It had a winter’s worth of pine cones and pine needles in it. There were weeds everywhere. It looked terrible.

There I stood making the communal townhouse garden presentable grumbling under my breath about the injustice of it all.

I’m the one who does most of the snow shoveling as well.

When the walk around needs to be done on the property it’s me or my wife that has to do it.

It’s totally not fair that the other owners here just let the place look like crap and I have to clean it all up.

The simple fact is that I could do it and grumble, or I could have a good attitude about it. Either way the job needed to be done and my only helper was a 2 year old.

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company…a church…a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past…we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you. We are in charge of our attitudes. – Chuck Swindoll

That bad project you grumble about and avoid, is it your attitude towards it that is the problem? Is your bad attitude creating a cycle that makes the project suck?

If you made the effort to work on the project happily, would you find that it’s really not bad to work on at all?

How much of your bad day is simply your attitude? How much is actually what happened?

photo credit: Ian Sane via photopin cc