I happened to read a few books and articles which indicated the importance of having the right attitude. I must agree that having the right attitude will get a person to be happy in the long run, to be successful and most importantly to be a good human. This reminds me of a story that I read or heard many years back. It’s a story of a fly which is trying to move to the ‘outside’ world and is currently inside the house. It tries to fight its way through the glass window. It can see where it wants to go i.e across the glass to the wonderful world waiting. It starts to push through the glass with all its might without any success. It rests for a few moments and then gathers all the strength and starts banging into the glass again with the hope of breaking free. Unfortunately, that didn’t help. After sometime, it again decided to rest and gather its energy. It tried to push through the glass again and again with all its might but failed and collapsed!
Though this is a story, it brings out a few points beautifully. Did the fly have enough motivation? Did it have enough courage? Did it have the right attitude? Did it put in enough hard work? Did it have the resilience of striving and not giving up? As you might probably agree, the answers of most of these questions is ‘yes’. But despite having the correct attitude, motivation, hard working capability, resilience why did it not succeed?
Probably because the attitude, motivation, hard work, resilience etc require a correct ‘direction’. Quite literally, if the fly changed direction and looked for the open door on the other side instead of banging against the window, it might have succeeded.
This doesn’t mean that one should give up when one is not succeeding but should be observant of ones own view from a 30,000 feet. Often we tend to get involved in activities and become myopic and measure our ‘success’ or ‘failures’ from within the web of mundane routines.
Well, that brings me to a rather light topic. Speaking of attitude, I remember seeing a slide that spoke highly of attitude and depicted it in a very interesting way.
It said that if we consider all the alphabets with corresponding numbers then we’d see some interesting results i.e. A = 1, B = 2, C = 3….Y = 25 and Z = 26.
So for example, apple would be indicated as
A + P + P + L + E => 1 + 16 + 16 + 13 + 5 = 51
Then it went on and ‘numerized’ a few more important words that are defined for being successful.
LOVE = 12 + 15 + 22 + 5 = 24
LUCK = 12 + 21 + 3 + 11 = 47
LEADERSHIP = 12 + 5 + 1 + 4 + 5 + 18 + 19 + 8+ 9 + 16 = 89
KNOWLEDGE = 11 + 14 + 15 + 23 + 12 + 5 + 4 + 7 + 5 = 96
DETERMINED = 4 + 5 + 20 + 5 + 18 + 13 + 9 + 14 + 5 + 5 = 97
FARSIGHTED = 6 + 1 + 18 + 19 + 9 + 7 + 8 + 20 + 5 + 4 = 97
HARDWORK = 8 + 1 + 18 + 4 + 23 + 15 + 18 + 11 = 98
KINDHEARTED = 11 + 9 + 14 + 4 + 8 + 5 + 1 + 18 + 20 + 5 + 4 = 99
All the qualities listed above are indeed important, however is there any quality that makes the total as 100?
Well ATTITUDE = 1 + 20 + 20 + 8 + 20 + 21 + 4 + 5 = 100!!
That’s a nice little way of expressing the importance of attitude.
Having looked at this, I wondered what other words would be ‘numerized’ to 100. I first got a list of around 58000 words used in English (COURTSEY: http://www.mieliestronk.com/wordlist.html). Then wrote a small visual basic script to get me the numerized values of all the words.
The results were interesting and made me smile.
Some other words that add up to 100 are:
Category 1 (positive or in similar lines to the word ATTITUDE)
DELIVERY
DISCIPLINE
EXCELLENT
BLISSFUL
COLLEAGUES
COMPANION
INTELLECT
INNOVATE
Category 2 (define it yourself!!! J )
STRESS
COVERUP
USELESS
WHENEVER
WHISKEY
CHIMPANZEE
UNDRESS
PUSSY
TOILETS
CACOPHONY
DISJOINT
INEFFICIENT
Well, I will continue to run through some more analysis and see if anything interesting emerges. J
