Page 79 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

60 • CEO Material: How to Be a Leader in Any Organization

toward things instead of a destructive angle. Your ability to be happy is
in direct proportion to your ability to rationalize.
Every morning I awake and I walk onto the stage of life and choose
whether it will be a comedy or a tragedy.

It’s not absolutely necessary to be a happy, optimistic person all the
time—but it helps. Regardless of what attitudinal environment you were
raised in, what your tendency is, or what people around you are, you can
choose to be an optimist. Train yourself to choose an optimistic point of
view about everything despite the actuality. Your reality can be based
entirely on your chosen perspective, and it will be as good a “reality” as
anyone else’s. Whichever thoughts you tend to carry around in your mind
tend to prove you’re right. A positive perspective might get you some-
where; a negative one will get you nowhere.
The only control you need more of in life is control over yourself.
The smallest attitude adjustment can change around your whole world.
Your brain and every cell in your body listens and corresponds to what
you tell it.
“I don’t believe in failure” is my mantra.

One CEO and avid art collector said to me, “The good thing about
my wife leaving me and taking all the art in the split is that it gives me
an excuse to buy more.”
You can complain about getting older or be glad you’ve lived long
enough to be old. You can count your blessings or add up your problems.
You can say you’re having “hot flashes” or a “power surge.” (I suppose
that you can say that you gave a “strategic deception” instead of a “lie”—
following our discussion on integrity!)
Again, I know there is plenty to be unhappy about in your life—war,
global hunger, illness, loneliness, aging, death. Still, as depressing as it is,
and no matter how bad it is, it’s worse elsewhere.
If you count your really, really bad days, what do you get, five or six
in a year? Not that bad out of 365. (What’s “bad,” by the way? You have
an office mate who doesn’t smile back when you say hello and you think
he talks about you behind your back? That’s nothing compared to a
cowboy I know who saddles up with a broken shoulder, six busted ribs,