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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I once missed a flight when I arrived 5 minutes before the plane was scheduled to depart, and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share the importance of positivity.

Today’s fun fact: We have all performed at least one high five, but where did the high five start? The origin of the high five can be traced back to a baseball game on October 2, 1977 between the Houston Astros and the Los Angeles Dodgers. In the sixth inning, Dusty Baker of the Dodgers hit a 3 run homer to tie the score. Glenn Burke was on deck. As Burke thrust his hand in the air, Baker instinctively smacked it. Burke then stepped up to the plate and also hit a homer. On the way back, Burke returned Baker’s slap, ushering in the era of the high five.

What I learned yesterday.
Let’s be honest, okay? Today is Monday, October 5, 2015 and like most other Mondays before it, it’s a Monday. Personally, I think Monday gets a bad rap. I know people dislike Monday because it means the weekend is over and we have to go back to work. It’s the opposite of that that gives Friday a good rap. But the truth is, Monday is just a day with 24 hours just like Friday and every other day.

What really matters is what we do with those 24 hours. What really matters is what think about those 24 hours. What really matters is how we invest that 24 hours.
While I think most of you will agree with what I’ve said so far, I think I may lose a few of you here. I think the same principle applies to TIMES of day. That is, I think mornings are just as great as evenings. Of course, we may have different energy levels at different times of day, but that does not make mornings a bad time of day or afternoons a good time of day. Each moment of each day is equally good. They are all ripe with opportunity. In fact, I’ll even go so far to say that the only major difference in the times of day is our mindset about them.

And there’s the word I want to focus on today. The word: mindset.

A few months ago my grandma called me and told me that she needed to get rid of her cable because the bill was too high. I told her what her options are and she decided to try an over the air antenna.

Her TV is about 10 years old. It’s an old tube style, non-HDTV, but it does have a digital tuner built-in. Unfortunately, I was not able to get her TV to pick up any of the channels she needed in order to get rid of her cable. I told her I’d do more research to find out her options. I had a lot going on at this time so it took me a month or so to actually look into it. Meanwhile she called me every week, sometimes a couple of times a week to ask me how to get rid of her cable.

Finally, I spoke with a local TV shop owner and he said that the problem could be that her TV is so old that the tuner is weak. She also lives in a low area, which makes it hard to get a good signal. To test his theory, I took the HDTV out of my bedroom over to my grandma’s house. I also purchased a high powered antenna.

I went over to her house armed with all the stuff and started by testing the new, high-powered antenna with her old TV. No luck. I then tried my TV with the low-powered antenna and it picked up all the channels she needed. I then tried my TV with the high-powered antenna and it got the same channels as the low-powered one.

I took time to program her TV, delete the channels she didn’t want, and show her how to work the remote. I then left my TV at her house and told her she could keep it until we were able to get her a new TV. She called the cable company the next day and cancelled her cable.

A week later she called me and asked me what she needed to do to hook her cable back up. I was confused. I couldn’t understand why she wanted to hook her cable back up when she had been calling me week after week asking me to help her get rid of it. She told me story after story about how she couldn’t afford it and how she would be able to use the money to get some dental work done. She told me about how none of the programs were worth watching and it was just a waste of money. So why in the world was she calling me a week later to help her turn it back on??!!

Well, it turned out that she did like having all those channels. Well, not ALL of them, but she liked more of them than she realized. What about the money? I thought she couldn’t afford it? Well, it wasn’t so bad. She could make it work.

I was getting short on patience.

This is the same thing she did when she moved from a town called Yukon to another one called Edmond. She went on for months and months to me, my dad, my brother, and my uncle asking us to help her move out of Yukon and over to Edmond. She had a whole list of why Yukon was terrible and why Edmond was better.

Once we moved her to Edmond, it took only one month for her to call me up and tell me she wanted to move back to Yukon. She still lives in Edmond, but hates it. She still regrets moving away from Yukon.

So what’s the real problem? Mindset.

She’s not alone. We’re all guilty of it. Even the best of us can get snagged by the negative mindset sometimes. My daughter has problems with it sometimes. She says things like, “it’s not fair!” Then she’ll start naming off all the things that are wrong with her life. She’ll start naming off all the things her friends have that she doesn’t. She name off all the things that her friends get to do that she doesn’t.

Here’s what I learned.
This negative mindset is like a cancer. It eats away at us. It brings us down, causes us undue worry, and sews discontent.

When Addison gets into these situations where she’s focusing (and exaggerating) the things that she doesn’t have, I’ll look over at her and say, “give me five.” At first she was confused. She didn’t know what I meant. Now that she does know, she gives me an eye roll. You know, the kind of eye roll that only a 12 year old can deliver?

I then ask her to give me five things that she’s thankful for. She’ll then complain about how stupid my little game is, and quickly rattle off five things. Even though she runs through the five things quickly, the game still does what it’s designed to do. It swings her mindset.

Let’s face it. We will never have all we want or desire. We will never have the things that other people have. We will never get to do all the things that other people do. The things we have won’t always do what we want them to do. We will often have to do things that we don’t want to do.

So what should we do? We should approach each situation with a positive mindset. When I’ve been in my darkest times, most frustrated times, loneliest times, and most depressed times, I’ve taken time to take five. When I’ve been in my happiest times, most joyous times, most victorious times, and confident times, I’ve taken time to take five.

Why? Because taking five not only helps bring your mindset back around to the positive, it brings your mindset back around to gratitude. With gratitude comes humility.

I know that not all of you are Bible readers, but there’s a lot of great wisdom in there. So today I want to leave you with a powerful nugget of wisdom found in the book of Philippians, chapter 4, verse 8. It says, “Finally brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable- if anything is excellent or praiseworthy- think about such things.

I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.

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