Inspiration from Brittany Packnett, Marcus Aurelius, Simon Sinek, and More - The Simple Dollar:
Marcus Aurelius on your thoughts and your life
"The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts." - Marcus Aurelius
Perhaps the single biggest revelation I had during the last ten years is that I have a ton of control over what I think about, and what I think about ends up shaping how I feel about a lot of things, how I react to things, and what I choose to do in life.
An example: if I spend my time thinking negative thoughts about working out, it's not going to be long before I'm simply completely uninterested in working out and I'm going to stop any sort of workout routine. Rather, if I catch myself thinking negative thoughts about it, I intentionally kill them and start thinking positive thoughts instead. "This will feel good. This will make me healthier. This will be fun. Remember how much you enjoyed that workout a few weeks ago? What did you do during that? Let's recreate it!" Thinking thoughts like that intentionally gets me more excited about exercising, makes it go better, and makes me feel better about it afterwards, and eventually I don't really have those negative thoughts any more.
This is true for everything. You have so much power over what you choose to think about things, and if you choose to think negative thoughts about the better but more challenging things in life, things will go poorly. Save your negative thoughts for the things that actually harm you and then let them fly, but give positive thoughts to the good things in life, like the person who's nice to you even when you feel grumpy. That person is awesome. Think about how awesome that person is.
(Via The Simple Dollar)