I believe I have already mentioned this, but Brian Tracy’s Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life is full of amazing tidbits of advice. One of the things he talks about in Chapter 1o: Supercharge Your Thinking is becoming an inverse paranoid - “A paranoid is someone who believes that people are conspiring against him or her. An inverse paranoid, in contrast, is a person who is convinced that the world is conspiring to make him or her successful. An inverse paranoid insists upon interpreting everything that happens as part of a great plan leading to success.”.
How awesome of a concept of this? Reframing your thinking to get out of the “woah is me, the world is out to get me” mindset and instead, embracing the idea that things are happening for you, not against you. Getting out of the victim mindset is a challenging one - as Tony Robbins says, it can become an emotional home which is so nice and cozy that we don’t want to leave. But leaving that emotional home opens up such a beautiful world.
I love this idea of being an inverse paranoid so much that I have adopted it myself. Part of it is because I already do it to some extent. The other part is a reminder to myself of the concept on a regular basis that the world is conspiring for my success.
This also pairs nicely with Covey’s idea of feeding opportunities while starving problems. “Effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems.” Taking the time to being proactive to focus our efforts on the opportunities in front of us helps shift our focus away from the urgency of problem-solving.
Both concepts give us insight into how we can choose to approach the world from a positive perspective and use it to our advantage.