See The Good

Courtesy Flickr Creative Commons

Every morning when you wake, you have a decision to make: Do you choose to see the good or will you focus on the bad?

If you like the idea of maximizing your happiness, it makes sense to surround yourself with as much of the good as you can. Ultimately you become influenced by the stimuli around you. If you want to see the good, surround yourself with people, content, and things that make you happy. This means eliminating or at least minimizing that which brings you down: news, family drama, office politics, etc. If you have a coworker that gets under your skin, figure out a way to spend less time around him. If you feel compelled to watch the news, instead of keeping CNN on the background and subjecting yourself to the continuous 20 minute loop of misery, limit yourself to one cycle, then turn it off.

One of the benefits of the internet is that you have the ability to control and fine tune the media you receive. News aggregation services help you to profile yourself and create parameters for the types of stories you want to receive. Flipboard is my favorite. It’s a free app that helps tailor stories based on your preferences then prioritizes them for you. It has a great interface to help you navigate and “flip” though the content.

If you want to begin tuning into more positive news, here are a few suggestions for topics:

1. Space: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson are three of most interesting and successful business people of our time. All three have ventures focused on commercial space travel. Musk even has a goal of colonizing Mars. In a typical week you’ll see a handful of news stories (usually positive) about one of their developments. On a feed like this you will also get stories from NASA and the European Space Agency. The stories over the past year about the New Horizons spacecraft as it mapped the surface of Pluto and its’ moons were extraordinary.
2. The advances in medical science are astounding. A group of researchers at Duke have had tremendous success through genetically engineering a strain of the Polio Virus to treat brain tumors.

There is a single vaccine being tested that has been able to protect against both Hepatitis C and HIV.

3. Humanitarian efforts around the globe: The Gates foundation has donated billions of dollars to help ensure that people in need have access to educational resources to help them succeed in life. They also fund medical care aimed at fighting disease across the globe. They have played a crucial role in completely eradicating Polio in India.

There are so many wonderful people doing amazing things everyday, yet so many of us continue to focus on the problems. It’s time to stop looking at what’s wrong with the world and see the good each day. All it takes is a decision and a little discipline. Let me know how you do.