As I sit here and write this, I can reflect on some great events in my life. The birth of my children, getting married, building a business that made me a millionaire and improved the lives of dozens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people, and having a career that is rewarding in every way. At the same time, a very wealthy man who seems determined to my financial destruction has filed multiple lawsuits against me personally, which cost me that business, contributed to my wife divorcing me and I am going through the IRS audit from hell .

Guess what? Life is perfect now. Perfect is different from preferred. That doesn’t mean that life is fair. It means that life is a mix of good and bad for everyone.

Imagine that you are floating above your city at about 15,000 feet, just looking down at your community. Do you see? What’s going on? It is a bit difficult to see, but you see that the community is full of people and movement. For a better view, float to about 3,000. Now you can see cars, houses and buildings. What you are seeing is life.

Looking down on that community, someone is being born, some people laugh, some die, some cry, some make love, some are abused, some study, some sleep while others dedicate themselves to the fullest. spectrum of activities. You are looking at life and as you look at life, you know that from birth to death, at any given moment, people in your community are experiencing the full range of good and bad. That’s life. Every day you hear the siren of an ambulance screaming and it tells you that someone is having a worse day than you.

That’s a macro view that can be broken down to a micro view of your own life or mine. Our lives are a mix of the good, the bad, and everything in between. It is what we choose to focus on that determines our outcome.

The most successful people can turn negative events in their lives into lessons that will accelerate their recovery and success. A major difference in the way successful people and struggling people view the past is what they attribute to a past event. Successful people will strip away the emotion of a negative event and only carry forward the lessons learned or use the emotion and pain of the event to propel them forward.

Sometimes you will hear a successful person in an interview ask you about a bad event or action in your past. They often disengage both from the event they describe in the third person and from “Even Michael Jordan has some lessons to learn …”

People who struggle tend to hold on to negative events from the past. Instead of dissociating themselves from what happened, they associate with it. One of the key conclusions I made after being criticized with lawsuits and a sad divorce is not letting those events define me.

Quite easily, he could have thrown in the towel, opened a karate school, and literally stepped back in time. But I spent years developing the programming, thought patterns, and strategies that I am discussing in this article. There was no way I could afford to get out on bail. Having a positive attitude is easy when things are going well. The better you are at creating a positive outlook and approach to life, the better things will go, even when they are not going so well.

When you are able to rethink your world in a life is perfect perspective, you begin to see the lessons that life offers you more clearly. You develop a curiosity about what is happening around you and towards you. Through these lawsuits, many friends have asked me how I handle it so well. My answer is that it has been a fascinating process to lose my business, my marriage, and a lot of my savings. It has taught me a lot about myself and how others respond to you when you are in a situation like this. The situation continues as I write this article. In fact, the situation is the inspiration behind my writing. I would not have been inspired to write this nor would I have anchored the lessons it teaches so deeply had I not been through this stress.

There is also no doubt that the success of my rebuilding process is a direct result of the lessons I teach. They worked for me and they will work for you. Resilient optimism is not about being happy, be lucky in the face of negative events. It is the ability to create your own “light at the end of the tunnel”.