Jerry was the
kind of guy you love to hate. He was always in a good mood and always had
something positive to say. When someone would ask him how he was doing, he
would reply, “If I were any better, I would be twins!”
He was a unique
manager because he had several waiters who had followed him around from
restaurant to restaurant. The reason the waiters followed Jerry was because of
his attitude. He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day,
Jerry was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the
situation.
Seeing this
style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Jerry and asked him, “I
don’t get it! You can’t be a positive person all of the time. How do you do
it?” Jerry replied, “Each morning I wake up and say to myself, Jerry, you have
two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be
in a bad mood.’ I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens,
I can choose to be a victim or I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn
from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept
their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the
positive side of life.”
“Yeah, right,
it’s not that easy,” I protested.
“Yes it is,”
Jerry said. “Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every
situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how
people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The
bottom line: It’s your choice how you live life.”
I reflected on
what Jerry said. Soon thereafter, I left the restaurant industry to start my
own business. We lost touch, but often thought about him when I made a choice
about life instead of reacting to it. Several years later, I heard that Jerry
did something you are never supposed to do in a restaurant business: he left
the back door open one morning and was held up at gunpoint by three armed
robbers. While trying to open the safe, his hand, shaking from nervousness,
slipped off the combination. The robbers panicked and shot him. Luckily, Jerry
was found relatively quickly and rushed to the local trauma center. After 18
hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Jerry was released from the
hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body. I saw Jerry about six
months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied, “If I were
any better, I’d be twins. Wanna see my scars?”
I declined to
see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the robbery
took place. “The first thing that went through my mind was that I should have
locked the back door,” Jerry replied. “Then, as I lay on the floor, I
remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live, or I could choose to
die. I chose to live.”
“Weren’t you
scared? Did you lose consciousness?” I asked. Jerry continued, “The paramedics
were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled
me into the emergency room and I saw the expressions on the faces of the
doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read, ‘He’s a dead
man.’ I knew I needed to take action.”
“What did you
do?” I asked.
“Well, there was
a big, burly nurse shouting questions at me,” said Jerry. “She asked if I was
allergic to anything. ‘Yes,’ I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working
as they waited for my reply… I took a deep breath and yelled, ‘Bullets!’ Over
their laughter, I told them, ‘I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am
alive, not dead.”
Jerry lived
thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude. I
learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully. Attitude,
after all, is everything.
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