The important of think positively

“The magic of thinking big” by Dr David J. Schwartz, a college professor in Georgia State University, Atlanta is a very fine, inspiring and interesting book to read. In the book he reveals several secrets to success. As by the writer what he meant by success are when you are able to gain personal prosperity. And this is varies from the strength of your financial, the power and influence, the ideal job satisfying and an enjoyable life.

I managed to finish chapter one yesterday. Basically the first chapter is about a belief to succeed. And if we set to believe to be able to succeed and there will be a bigger probability that we will success in whatever our doing. I do agree with what the writer said about the personal prosperity. Except that for me I would sort the items in my own way of defining success in life. As a muslim, of course I wanted to committed my entire life to perform my duty to Allah. And major hope that Allah will bless my right doing and if it happened that if I accidently doing the wrong thing, Allah will give guidance to me so that my life will be much blessing and with this blessing I believe I will gain the personal prosperity. And as an educator, the financial strength as mentioned by the writer is not the yard stick to measure my success. If I really wanted to gain prosperity in term of financial security, I wouldn’t have chosen educator as my career. No doubt I do agree that a fine home (I’m grateful to have one), a loving and caring husband, obedient, healthy and cheerful daughter and sons have proved that I am actually now am enjoying the life given to me.

Dr. Schwartz did emphasize the important of having positive thinking and positive attitude. Our mind is very vital influence to the thinking and positive attitude. He did state that our mind is our thought factory and this factory has two foremen which is Mr Triumph and Mr Defeat. Hmm our mind will give signal to the foremen to do work. If we set the positive things then it will signal Mr Triumph and if we set negative things then, it will signal to the Mr. Defeat. As a human, I always trying to have a belief to positive thinking and always strive toward it. However, as proverb says “Hope for the best but expect for the worse”. Thought I will strive harder towards the success, but I must prepare myself to accept for the worse. And it doesn’t mean that I expect for the worse. All my effort will bring me the success and usually when we set to success, it wills success. I remember last time, before I planned to further to my second degree, my worries has risen, keep on asking, “Can I continue, can I focus on studying because my age at that time is already 34 to 35 years old”. But I’ve set very deep, very high to complete the study and even I was given a duration of two years to complete my study, I managed to complete in one an half year. And believe it or not, my CGPA is not bad at all. However I must say that all this success wouldn’t come without the support of people I loved surrounded me. I get the encouragement from them. And don’t forget to mention without the support from the government I wouldn’t achieve the second degree in my life.

And lately I was given two classes to handle. The first class, I have combinations of student from different races while the other classes consists of malay student. As usual, when it comes to the jargons in Information Technology subject, I can’t avoided using the English terms thought the class is conducted in malay but some of the term in IT, remains the usage of English terms. One of the class would preferred me to teach in mixed language, which is English and malay. But the other class is so phobia to English. When they encountered English word, they sort of holding back. I always emphasised to them, that this class is ICT class, and I don’t want language is to be the barrier for them to gain as much knowledge and skills in ICT. What I advised them is everytime you come to my class, don’t forget to bring along your dictionary coz, it might come in handy. And I do teach them, how to get the translation when they are stuck with it. And I feel that I have the responsibility to embedded the confidence level in them. Some of them have very good result in SPM, but when it comes to English, they sort of less confidence. I do mentioned to them, that if they can have very good result in Bahasa Arab, which is also a language, then they shouldn’t have difficulty in English. I urge them to practise more and more. And I even encouraged them to talk in English if possible. Do Set the believe that language is not the barrier for you to gain as much knowledge and skill in the technology. If you put the belief, then I’m sure you will success and each time you have difficulty, you know where to resolve. As mentioned also in Dr Swartz writing that, in his story to choose between a person with high IQ and can memorize better and to a person with a less IQ but have the skill in solving problems, he would rather choose the later. Hmm this one I kind a agree with him. Coz, nowadays if we want to get informations, we can use technology, “Just in time”.

So much for chapter one, we move toward chapter two. This chapter suggest some cure to excusitis. Excusitis is actually the failure to disease. The writer lists four common excuses which are health, intelligence, age and luck excuses. Some people give excuse to success due to their lack of health, or less intelligence, or too old or too young and problem on bad luck. The writer gives several suggestions to recover and cure the listed excuses given. It is very interesting in how he related the excuses with the real life situation that he encountered and the suggestions for curing the excuses.