The Hundred Simple Secrets of Happy People [34 of 100]

34.....It's not what happened, it's how you think
about what happened.

There is no objective way to tell you if you have had a good life, a good day, or a good hour. Your life is a success based only upon your judgment.

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A study was done recently in which people on opposite sides of an issue where given the same newspaper article to read. The people were asked to read the article carefully and to offer their
reaction. On average, people said they thought the article was biased—against their own position. That is, people on both sides of the issue thought the exact same article was biased
against their side. The article could not possibly have been biased against both sides of the issue. Obviously, it wasn't the content of the article that drove the reaction, but the perspective of the readers. Life events have the same effect. The same event can be seen positively, or it can be seen negatively. It depends upon your perspective.

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Knowing whether someone has recently suffered a personal setback or personal triumph is not as good a predictor of how satisfied they are with their lives as is knowing how they perceive the causes and consequences of those events.

Staats, Armstrong-Stassen, and Partillo 1995