
There are three outlooks on life I know don’t work.
- Clinging to the past (because there is no future in it)
- Pessimism (because there is no incentive for hope)
- Conspiracy theories (because the dark side isn’t that well organized)
After years of gathering anecdotal evidence by watching people, I’ve observed that various leaders who expressed these attitudes all seemed to have struggling operations. There’s something that flows from our attitudes to the outcomes in our lives. Warren Buffett is one of the most optimistic people I follow, and he’s got the goods to back it up.
Out of all the available attitudes, there is one that consistently works: “Have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had” (Philippians 2:5 GW). God never qualified this expectation by saying he would understand if under certain circumstances we would have lousy attitudes. He makes no exceptions. The genius of God is in the fact that we are always in the process of acquiring Christ’s attitude. That means we need to think about Jesus a lot: what he did for us and what he would do if he were in our situations. The Bible gives us clear accounts of both. And the Holy Spirit enables us to absorb Jesus’ atoning work and exemplary life into our own attitudes and press them into every corner of our being. That is the attitude that will work for us today, tomorrow, and forever.