I remember a short-lived cartoon from when I was about nine or ten years old called The Pebbles and Bam-Bam Show. It focused on the Flinstones’ and the Rubbles’ kids in their teenage years. Sally Struthers (Gloria on All in the Family) and Jay North (Dennis the Menace) voiced the title characters. But the character that stands out the most was Bad Luck Schleprock (voiced by Don Messick, who was also behind the similar voice of Droopy the Dog and hundreds of other cartoon characters from my youth).
Schleprock’s signature line was, “Oh wowsie wowsie woo woo. Miserable day, isn’t it?” He seemed to live under a perpetual dark cloud and brought bad luck with him wherever he went. You could say he was the death of the party due to his poor attitude.
The word “attitude” has gotten a bad rap in recent years. It’s often come to mean that someone has given us some lip or has been seen as too haughty. As in, “Don’t give me that attitude!”
Or we tend to think of attitude as something that happens to us. As if we have no control over it. It’s like a cloud that settles over us and we have no way to get out from under it. Wowsie wowsie woo woo.
But many times we have much more control over our attitude than we realize. And it’s the successful person who has figured out how to maximize a positive attitude in order to move forward.
At no time is this more important than when we fail. When we stumble, it is so easy to fall into a pit of despair and failure, wallowing in a negative attitude that colors the rest of our day. We find ourselves under a cloud. And it seems to move with us.
Even the word “fail” has such negative baggage with it, and is so close to the word “failure.” No one wants to be a failure, but it’s easy to go from “I’ve failed” to “I’m a failure.”
What if, instead, we looked at failures as opportunities to learn? What if, instead of beating ourselves up, we did some deep thinking about how we can grow from the experience and be better the next time? What if, instead of feeling defeated, we took an honest appraisal of what went well and what we can improve on, and looked with a positive attitude to how we can be even better?
We have the power to walk out from under that dark cloud and create a new reality. And it all starts with attitude.
Beautiful day, isn’t it?
It’s a beautiful day indeed. Teddy Roosevelt’s “The man in the arena.” This from a man who seemed to fail at nothing. How he epitomized the fact that it’s our efforts through which we define our character, victories and defeats. Failure is our means to better understand our strengths. Where to work and where to help others to help us work harder. Success is ever fleeting, effort in tenacity, our ability to more than cope but hope.
This is just what I needed to hear. And Schleprock for all his bad luck had his positive traits, such as always being willing to help out, so there’s that too.