Conclusion

The concept of choosing positive over negative applies to all of the keys. Each key has the opposite choice available. You can choose to be positive or negative, constructive or destructive. Your life is yours to build, and it is yours to destroy. Taking charge of “how you think” is taking charge of your life. 

“The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts; therefore, guard accordingly and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.” 

Marcus Antonius

Be responsible and accountable for your thoughts and your actions, as every action starts out as a thought. 

None of us lives in a bubble. Our thoughts are a form of energy, and they have an effect on those around us. Remember that any temper tantrum, gossip session, or pity party will do harm to anyone whom you touch with that negative energy. By being aware of how your actions affect others, you will have more control over your choice of actions. You can yell at the girl in the drive-through window and wreck her day, or you can smile and pay her a nice compliment. Which choice do you think will make her feel better? Which choice do you think will make you feel better? Which will make the world better? 

Of course, if the girl in the drive through window was a master of all of the keys, she would not be offended by a buffoon who needs to yell at her. Unfortunately, very few people are practitioners of higher thought. The chances are that the girl in the window is a regular human being with a regular skill set. How you choose to treat her will almost certainly have an effect on her. Even if by chance your actions do not affect her, your actions will still affect you. Choosing to be positive is choosing to be good to yourself. If you have learned to love and accept yourself, you will then have the strength to treat yourself well. 

Instead of only walking the paths that will bring more toys into your garage, spend some time on the paths that will bring more joy into your life. It’s not the toys; it’s the joy that we are really striving for.

Think positive, think free;
Live positive, Live free. 

– Mark Edward Meincke 

More inspiration

“Courage is realizing you’re afraid and still acting.” 

Rudi Guiliani

“A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation: ‘As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.’” 

Joseph Campbell

“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” 

Anais Nin

“If we didn’t live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I’ve no doubt, but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.” 

Virginia Woolf

“The meaning I picked, the one that changed my life: Overcome fear, behold wonder.”

Richard Bach

“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones, and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.” 

Victor Hugo

“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.” 

Alan Cohen

“This is courage in a man: to bear unflinchingly what heaven sends.”

Euripedes

“The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.” 

Bishop W.C. Magee

“Every time you meet a situation, though you think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it, you find that forever after you are freer than you were before.” 

Eleanor Roosevelt

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” 

William Shakespeare

“One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead.” 

Oscar Wilde

“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.” 

Henry Ford

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” 

Mark Twain

“We never know how high we are Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan, Our statures touch the skies.” 

Emily Dickinson

“To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” 

Soren Kierkegaard

“What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” 

Marianne Williamson

“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” 

Andre Gide

“Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.” 

Marilyn Ferguson

“Plunge boldly into the thick of life!” 

Goethe

“Confidence, like art, never comes from having all the answers; it comes from being open to all the questions.” 

Earl Gray Stevens

“What worries you, masters you.” 

Haddon W. Robinson

“One must think like a hero merely to behave like a decent human being.” 

May Barton

About the Author

Mark Meincke is known as a profoundly insightful problem solver with an almost childlike curiosity about how things work & why they are how they are. 

His natural talents enable him to reverse engineer results in order to indentify the key factors that caused them. 

Mr. Meincke is highly regarded as an authority on achievement psychology, and is widely recognized as a dynamic, engaging speaker. 

He currently lives on a picturesque acreage near Edmonton Alberta Canada with his wife and two young sons.