The power of perspective is an amazing thing and something I’ve learned a lot about in the past few weeks from a young man I am mentoring. He experienced a life altering accident on the football field his sophomore year of high school rendering him a quadriplegic. The more I speak with him the more I find myself feeling like the student and him the teacher. I’ve been so impressed with his perspective that I’ve done some research I want to share with
Did you know there are numerous psychological studies which reveal that people who have experienced accidents rendering them quadriplegic report having greater happiness after the accident than lottery winners after becoming millionaires? The reasoning behind this is that the accident victims have had to adjust to their conditions and in doing so have learned to greatly appreciate being alive. They realize every day is a blessing.
Psychologists call it “sudden wealth syndrome”. Lottery winners are prone to develop symptoms of: depression, guilt, stress, and social isolation as a result of their windfall. Additionally a majority of them wind up broke within just a few years of winning. Many of them claim that winning the lottery wasn’t all that it is made out to be and that winning the lottery was the worst thing that ever happened to them. Before winning they expected money to solve all their problems. In reality it created new ones
We make our own happiness and our own misery, don’t we? It’s about what we do not what happens to us. In other words you’re either living in vision or you’re living in circumstance it’s all about your perspective.