The Unexposed Secret Of Positive Mind Set

Johnny Townsend: Nobody wants to read ‘The Power of Positive Giving Up’

Corporate and business leaders insist that to be successful, we must be positive. We’re encouraged to read books on “The Power of Positive Thinking,” “The Magic of Thinking Big” and “The Secret.”

If we have doubts about a project, we’re scolded for our weakness and bad attitude. If we fail to plan, we plan to fail. We can’t win unless we play. We’re told to make it happen, do more with less, that the difference between an obstacle and an opportunity is our attitude toward it.

And yet these “leaders” are the first to say, “Medicare for All? Tuition-free college? Guaranteed childcare? A Green New Deal? You’re asking the impossible! Be realistic!”

Managers tell their employees that only the insecure blame others for their personal failures. We need to take responsibility for our lack of success, they say, accept ownership and do better. But pro-corporate Democrats routinely blame progressives when their lackluster moderate candidates lose.

During my seven years at a credit union, one of the other employees made the same proclamation every morning: “It’s the best day ever!” Other employees marveled at his good attitude. The supervisor praised him for thinking like a winner. But you can’t honestly have a better day every single day of your life. If things are going great on your 23rd birthday, what happens 20,000 days later? Will you have $60 billion, a perfect body and the serenity of Buddha?

It’s OK to have a bad day and to say so. It’s OK to be realistic.

But to claim that the programs we need are “too big to succeed” just means they aren’t banks and auto manufacturers.

If my coworker at the credit union had told our supervisor, “I’m not even going to try eliminating discrimination in the loan process. People just aren’t capable of that level of decency,” would the supervisor have praised him for his cannot-do attitude?

Having a positive attitude toward accepting injustice is to have a negative attitude toward creating it. Having a positive attitude toward the wealthiest 1% is to have a negative attitude toward 99% of humanity.

One of the teachers at my Baptist high school quoted scripture regularly. “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me,” he told the class one day.

“I can pass Algebra?” I asked.

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“I can win the Olympics?” asked another student.

“I can jump to the moon and back?”

I wished I’d been the one to ask that. I’d certainly been thinking it.

“You have a really bad attitude, young man. You need to stop listening to Satan.”

Moderate Democrats insist we nominate bland candidates who won’t offend Republicans. I can’t think of a worse “winning” attitude. I’ve read “The Secret.” Nowhere does it advise aiming low and settling for only the smallest of dreams.

When I volunteered as a Mormon missionary in Rome, one of my mission leaders promised, “If you have faith even as small as a grain of mustard seed, you can baptize 40 people a month, 100 people. Every single one of you. If you have faith.”

With my bad attitude, and because I did pass my math classes, I made some quick calculations. With 120 missionaries in Rome, we’d be converting 12,000 Catholics a month, 144,000 a year, 288,000 by the end of our two years in Italy. As there were four missions in the country at the time, that would mean 1,152,000 converts by the time we left.

A core principle of capitalism is eternal growth, higher sales every month, indefinitely. “We had the best quarter ever.”

Yes, some things are impossible. Other things that seem impossible are just hard.

For years, running a four-minute mile seemed a physiologically unattainable goal. Then someone did it. And thousands more runners have since beaten his time.

Other countries have already achieved universal health care. Other countries have already established tuition-free college, guaranteed childcare and free public transportation.

When a job applicant tells us, “I simply can’t do what your job description says, and I won’t waste my time trying. When do I start?” we know not to hire that person.

And when the job is mayor, or city council member, or senator, or representative, or president, we don’t need a job applicant whose lifelong dream is to write the worst-seller “The Power of Positive Giving Up.”

Johnny Townsend, Seattle, is the author of, “Breaking the Promise of the Promised Land,” “Human Compassion for Beginners” and “Am I My Planet’s Keeper?”

Prince Harry Speaks Out About Building a 'Positive Mindset' in Latest Mental Health Initiative

Prince Harry Supports Mental Health in Rugby World Cup PSA | PEOPLE.com | PEOPLE.comCloseDown TrianglePreviousClosePreviousNextNextNextPreviousPreviousPreviousPreviousDown TrianglePreviousellipsisMailiphoneImage zoomImage zoomCloseNextCloseClose Top Navigation View image

Prince Harry Speaks Out About Building a 'Positive Mindset' in Latest Mental Health Initiative

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Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez Offers Glimpse into American Tragedy

by Brian Tallerico

January 15, 2020 | Print Page

Aaron Hernandez was an incredible talent on the football field. At the University of Florida, he won a Championship. As a member of the New England Patriots, he played in the Super Bowl. Only eight years after that win, we should be talking about his career, but the Netflix documentary launching today about Aaron Hernandez is not entirely about football because Aaron Hernandez was also a murderer. Convicted of killing Odin Lloyd in 2013 and accused of killing two other men in 2012, Aaron Hernandez was a ticking time bomb who just happened to be playing the most popular sport in the world. If authorities are to be believed, he killed two men after an incident at a bar, got away with it, and then was on the world's biggest super stage at the Super Bowl. And then went back and killed again. How does someone who seems to have it all go so wrong? How can a moral code be so destroyed that someone who should be a positive force in the world becomes a convicted murderer? The truth is that there are no simple answers to questions like these but “Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez” tries to paint a bigger picture of an American tragedy.

Cutting back and forth between the trial of Aaron Hernandez for the murder of Odin Lloyd, interviews with people who knew Hernandez, and a chronological look at his upbringing and early career, “Killer Inside” can feel a bit scattershot at times. Just as it seems to be digging a little deeper into one aspect of this story, it moves on to another one, but the three episodes achieve a cumulative power. It seems likely that the creators of “Killer Inside” know that no single thing that can be pointed to as cause and effect in the life of Aaron Hernandez, and so they spend time on a variety of subjects, all of which arguably had an impact.

One, Hernandez’s very strict father died when he was 16, and that left the young man rudderless. A year later, he was on the field taking out his aggression and smoking weed through most of his college years. Two, he got away with whatever he wanted at Florida, including punching a bartender who just wanted the local superstar to pay his bill. One of the more interesting threads of “Killer Inside” is the suggestion that this kind of privilege fomented a belief that Hernandez could do anything he wanted. Three, the story that Aaron Hernandez was a closeted homosexual is given a great deal of screen time, including interviews with a former teammate who also claims to be a former lover. It not only adds weight to the theory that Lloyd was killed because he discovered the truth about Hernandez’s sexuality but that the Patriot was emotionally damaged by having to keep such a secret. And, of course, “Killer Inside” eventually gets to CTE, and the fact that Hernandez’s brain was more damaged than anyone’s should be at his age, perhaps destroying his impulse control and moral center.

“Killer Inside” walks a very fine line when it comes to excusing and forgiving Hernandez’s behavior. The producers wisely return to the Lloyd family often, reminding us that none of these “reasons” forgive murder. “Killer Inside” gets sharpest when it interrogates the culture of football and even the Patriots specifically, particularly in the revelation that the administration got Hernandez his own apartment, one in which he basically smoked weed all day and avoided his family—two things that likely didn’t help his decline. I wished that “Killer Inside” took aim a bit more at a sport that, even though I love it and watch it, fails people like Aaron Hernandez, a man who clearly needed more help than those who made money off him at Florida and in New England were willing to give. It’s telling that no one from either organization appears on camera, although we do see Patriots CEO Robert Kraft and former teammate Rob Gronkowski in evasive interviews. I’d love to hear what these people really knew and thought about Aaron Hernandez, and if they suspected he was a slow-motion car crash that they just couldn’t stop.

Ultimately, after three hours of this story, I’m not sure how much I know about the “mind” of Aaron Hernandez beyond that it chose to take another life. Although perhaps the lesson here is that that’s all we will ever really be able to know.

Whole series screened for review.

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