I listened to a podcast the other day where Wayne Dyer recounted a story from a newspaper where the writer had experienced an unusual taxi ride. The driver was dressed smartly, in a shiny clean cab. He picked up his bags and opened the door for him, and the inside of the cab was just as clean and shiny as the outside. Once in the car, the driver asked his passenger if he would like a tea or coffee; he joked and said he preferred something different, at which point the driver told him he had a cooler of soft drinks from which he could take his pick. The driver handed him a list of the radio stations he could tune to for his journey.
Intrigued, the passenger asked his driver whether he had always acted this way in his cab. The driver responded that no, he had only made a change after reading a book. He decided to take a different approach to his work, and to strive to be the best cab driver he could possibly be. He went on to explain that he had doubled his income within the first year, and had gone on to quadruple it – he now gave out business cards and was often fully booked by people who much preferred his service.
What does this have to do with eagles and ducks?
Next time you’re near the pond, take a look at the ducks. They walk around, quacking about everything. They don’t often fly; they just quack… they often sound like they’re moaning or arguing.
Eagles, on the other hand, soar above everything quietly.
Living your best life doesn’t mean that you need to quit your “normal” job and become one of those people on Instagram flashing their cash and their cars. More to the point, if you stay on the ground and quack like a duck about your problems all day, you don’t stand much chance of that any way.
Instead, change the way you look at things – and the things you look at will change. The taxi driver in the story didn’t double his income and then decide to keep his cab all clean and shiny with a choice of drinks and snacks; he made the changes first. He decided that rather than complain about being a taxi driver, about not having any money or whatever, he would make an effort to change the way he looked at things.
There is this notion these days that you’re not “successful” if you don’t have a particular type of job, or if you don’t drive a particular make of car – or if you’re not posting selfies by the pool with the caption “working from the pool today I love my <insert network marketing company here> business”.
I would argue that success is better judged by how happy a person is in their life. You can be a street sweeper and make the decision to do your job brilliantly every day, and derive such satisfaction from a job well done that you are much more happy than the office worker in the power suit who sits at their desk pushing paper around and aiming to look busy until 5:30 rolls around.
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