Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.

Some people read business books looking for confirmation. I read them in search of disquiet. Confirmation is cheap, easy and ineffective. Restlessness and the scientific method, on the other hand, create a culture of testing and inquiry that can't help but push you forward.

Gratitude has received little serious attention in the literature on job attitudes. This may be because most people see it as a spontaneous emotional response to an external event. But University of California psychologist Robert Emmons makes a compelling argument that gratitude is better thought of as a discipline or a skill, more akin to goal-setting or time management, rather than simply another dimension of job satisfaction. It’s something that you choose to do, and,for most people, it requires practice—that is, consciously making an effort to be more grateful. It involves a reexamination of the benefits that you have experienced and simply learned to take for granted.

It’s important to note that practicing gratitude doesn’t mean pretending that everything in life is going well when it isn’t. It doesn’t eliminate negative emotional responses to negative events. If you are passed up for a promotion, you’re still right to feel disappointed. The difference is that being grateful for the things that are going well provide context that helps stabilize negative emotions.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances - to choose one’s own way.

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.

Yesbutters don�t just kill ideas.
They kill companies, even entire industries.
The yesbutters have all the answers. Yesbut we�re different.
Yesbut we can�t afford it.
Yesbut our business doesn�t need it.
Yesbut we couldn�t sell it to our workforce.
Yesbut we can�t explain it to our shareholders.
Yesbut let�s wait and see.
All the answers. All the wrong answers.

Whynotters move Companies.

The next time you�re in a meeting, look around and identify
the yesbutters, the notnowers and the whynotters.
God bless the whynotters. They dare to dream. And to act.
By acting, they achieve what others see as unachievable.
Why not, indeed?

Positive people tend to do better in the workplace, and it isn't just because people like them more than naysayers. Positive people cognitively process more efficiently and more appropriately. If you're in a negative mood, a fair amount of processing is going to that mood. When you're in a positive mood, you're more open to taking in information and handling it effectively.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.

I constantly have warned our people over the years that, as we became bigger and more successful, our primary potential enemy was ourselves, not our competitors. Getting cocky, getting complacent, thinking that the world was our oyster, disregarding our competitors, both new and old. I think humility is very important in keeping your eye on the carrot, keeping focused outwardly instead of inwardly, and knowing when you have to change.

You can't really be disciplined in what you do unless you are humble and open-minded. Humility breeds open-mindedness - and really, what we try to do is establish a clear and simple set of values that we understand. That simplifies things; that expedites things. It enables the extreme discipline I mentioned in describing our strategy. When an issue comes up, we don't say we're going to study it for two and a half years. We just say, "Southwest Airlines doesn't do that. Maybe somebody else does, but we don't." It greatly facilitates the operation of the company.

It's what you learn after you know everything that counts.

It is a funny thing about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.

...everything can be taken from us but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances — to choose one's own way.