A young lady wrote a letter home from college that read:
“Dear Mom: Sorry I haven’t written sooner, but my arm has been broken. I broke it, and my left leg, when I jumped from the second floor of my dormitory…you see my dorm room was on fire. We were lucky because a young service station attendant saw the blaze and called the Fire Department. They were there in minutes. I was in the hospital for a few days and Paul, the service station attendant, came to see me every day. And because it was taking so long to get our dormitory in livable conditions again, I decided to move in with Paul. He has been so nice. I just recently discovered that I am pregnant. But, dont worry, Paul and I plan to get married just as soon as he can get a divorce from his wife. I hope things are fine at home. I’m doing fine, and will write more when I get the chance. Love,
Your daughter, Susie
P.S. None of the above is true. I just wanted you to have the “Proper Perspective!” because I did get a “C” in Sociology and a “D” in Chemistry.

Have you noticed that as human beings, there seems to be within us an innate tendency to focus on either the negative or positive side of any given situation, without consideration of an alternate view? It’s a conditioning behavior; known is the computer world as WYSISYG (What You See Is What You Get) that is so strong that the world expects to receive immediately the results of that which we initially perceive.

As a general rule, our focus tends to color our reactions, which then become the motivation of our self-fulfilling prophecies in doom and gloom or a satisfied life. Those who naturally focus on the positive usually possess a happy disposition while the more extreme are simply discounted as not being in touch with reality. Yet those who have a preoccupation with the negative often end up looking ridiculous or foolish for having “jumped to conclusions.”

I believe it was with this innate human tendency in mind that the idea of Thanksgiving Day first evolved. The pilgrims gathered with the natives to celebrate in thanksgiving, despite the fact that nearly half the colony had died that first winter. Later on in 1863 when America was in the midst of the Civil War, at a time when no one in their right mind would consider thanking God for the large number of deaths that came with it, Abraham Lincoln had the wisdom and foresight to call us together as a divided nation to give thanks, because Lincoln understood that gratitude was a tool that could be used to change our focus.

Similarly the Christian hymn “Now Thank We All Our God” was written in the1600’s during the darkness of the Thirty Years’ War by Marin Rinkart. Rinkart was a German pastor, who buried five thousand of his parishioners in one year, at an average of fifteen a day. As his parish was ravaged by war, death, and economic disaster and with the cries of fear outside his window, he sat down and penned the words to this hymn, “Now thank we all our God / With heart and hands and voices;/ Who wondrous things had done,/ In whom His world rejoices.” Here was a man who understood that gratitude forces us to consider the hope that comes from God, and not from outward circumstances. He indeed was a man with a proper perspective.

There can be no doubt that gratitude is one of the great human accomplishments while ingratitude can be counted as one of the great human failings. I think ingratitude comes from two things: the first is oblivion, and the second is entitlement.

The first one should be pretty clear. We are just simply not as aware as we ought to be. We need to make a conscious effort, because there are people for whom we should be grateful and there are opportunities all around us to express that gratitude.

Entitlement on the other hand is the sense that we deserve and that we are entitled to what we have. It is a dangerous attitude that continually stands in the way of gratitude in which we carry around a sense of being owed for something we have done or for some wonderful trait we have. To some degree, we all have entitlement feelings. When we feel entitled, we focus on what we are owed, not what we might need to give to others. It is a “one-way street” mind-set in which we feel we are entitled to a long life, good health, a loving relationship, obedience from our children, and a 15% return on our investments but when people don’t meet our expectations, we often find ourselves bitter, resentful, and angry about being ripped-off and cheated out of what we feel we rightly deserve.

But entitlement is a lie and it’s a perversion of reality. There is nothing in the universe that states, we deserve to live a long, happy, and successful life! The feelings of entitlement are born from within our own mind. Objectively speaking, there is no basis for any such claim.

Gratitude on the other hand is the recognition that life owes me nothing and all the good I have is a gift and a fundamental truth of reality.

So how do you keep a proper perspective? Let me illustrate with the following story.
A recent college graduate and newly recognized CPA returned home from Harvard Business School to visit his father’s shoe repair shop. After looking around the young man says, “Dad, I don’t understand how you run your business. Your accounts payable are on a spindle. Your accounts receivables are in a cigar box. Your cash flow is in your pocket. How can you tell what your profit is?”
The father replied, “Son, when I came to this country the only thing I owned was a pair of pants. Now I own this business, your mother and I own our home. We put you all through college. Your sister is a doctor, your brother is a lawyer and you are a CPA graduated from Harvard. Determining my profit is really pretty simple. Add it all up and subtract the pants.