One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
On the surface, this appears to be another cliche and easily forgettable saying always reiterated by the do-good optimists who have never faced anything that really knocked them down. But before you discount the words above, evaluate and analyze them with regards to the lifesaving principal that they convey; gratitude.
Gratitude is often overlooked when it comes to its importance in the process of improvement. Without gratitude, a crucial weapon would be missing from your arsenal when faced with extreme odds (or any odds for that matter), and the susceptibility to falling on your knees to the potential failure being put in front of you rises greatly. The ability of an individual to be grateful for adversity is directly related to how that person fares against it.
Looking back at the original saying presented in the first line of this post;
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
What this means is that where one man may perceive a situation as negative, unjust, impossible, a fruitless obstacle etc. The man standing next to him may view the situation as a challenge, a challenge that holds the potential for growth and prosperity at the end of its tunnel. These two men may begin identical in nature (with the exception of the treasure man’s ability to apply gratitude), yet in the end game they will be worlds apart, as the trash man’s oblivious eyes led him to quit from the start, and the treasure man’s foresight allowed him to rise above the adversity and sit on his newfound throne. It is because of gratitude that the treasure man was able to see past the trash-like facade of the treasure, recognizing that while on its surface the treasure appears to be undesirable and a waste of time, yet in reality the action of stripping away that facade and revealing the shining gold is an even greater reward than the gold itself.
Something that has always interested me was the paper thin line between too much negativity and just enough to fuel you to push through whatever fight you are currently participating in. We all know the feeling; when the going gets tough and it is time to grit your teeth and hunker down until the battle has ended. The gritting of the teeth is the releasing of negativity and the use of it as a fuel source. The power that negativity holds is extreme, however detrimental to the user of it if not controlled. This is where the balance between too much and too little comes in to play, and the older I get the more that I realize how similar the two sides can appear. Coming back to the topic of this post, gratitude is a valuable tool that can be exploited to shift the balance of negativity higher, allowing you to grit your teeth longer and create an even more vicious hunger for victory. The reason this is possible is the same reason the treasure man saw beauty where another man saw trash: gratitude allows you to fight harder and angrier as you use it to keep an overlying essence of positivity, because you are grateful for the opportunity for improvement that you have been given.
There is a reason that failure is the most important part of the process, because in failure, you are forced to be grateful for the opportunity if you want to push forward and on through to the next step.
“Even in death there is beauty.” – Eric Thomas
An Opinion or Two 