Hi everyone. Today I would like to talk about focusing on what we have instead of what we don’t have. As an example I am going to use a sports team. The team is the San Francisco 49ers and they are an American football team in the National Football League (the NFL). Prior to last year, the niners were very successful advancing to the NFL semi-finals twice and the championship once. But at the beginning of the 2014 season, rumors started to filter out of the organization. The management and the coach were at odds with each other. The players did not like the intense coaching style. The players themselves had off the field issues like being arrested for drunk driving, domestic abuse and other incidents. Needless to say, the performance suffered. The niners ended the season with a record of 8-8 and did not make the playoffs. The coach was fired. In the off-season, many veteran players retired. Also many players left the team and joined other teams. All the football analysts said the niners would be lucky to break even and most probably they will have a losing season. The analysts focused on what the niners did not have, as reasons for the dismal prediction. But slowly, the team overcame its shortcomings and at the niners won the first game of the season by a score of 23-3. I watched the game and what I noticed was some younger players stepped up, the remaining veteran players also picked up their game a notch. I know it is early. There are 15 more games left. But my point is that they focused on who they had instead of worrying about all the people that left the team. Take Spud Webb. He was 5 feet 4 inches tall. He wanted to play basketball in the National Basketball Association (NBA). He was told, he is not tall enough. But he had great ball handling skills. He was nimble and fast and very accurate. In 1986, he won the NBA dunking contest against people who were much taller than him. Or how about an author Theo Giesel. He was told he could not use higher than a first grade vocabulary and no more than 50 different words. You may know Theo better as Dr. Seuss and the book was Green Eggs and Ham. Finally Joanne, a single mother living on welfare, using an old typewriter wrote a book that was rejected by 12 different publishers. But for her, 13th time was the charm. The author was J K Rowling and the book was Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone!!

I hope you like this post. I hope all of us can focus on what we have and make the best of it.