One of our business advisors sent this out recently and I’d thought I’d share the story with you:
This is Good
A great tale I came across this week tells the story of a king in Africa who had a close friend with whom he grew up. The friend had developed a habit of looking at every situation in his life, whether positive or negative, and remarking simply, “This is good!”
One day the king and his friend were on a hunting expedition. On such trips his friend would load and prepare the guns for the king. He had had apparently done something wrong in preparing one of the guns, because, after taking the gun from his friend and pulling the trigger, the gun misfired and his thumb was blown off.
Considering the situation, his friend remarked, as usual, “This is good!”
To which the king replied, “No, this is not good!” and promptly ordered friend to jail.
About a year later, the king was hunting in a region he should have known to stay clear of. The local tribe of Cannibals captured him and took them to their village. They tied his hands, stacked some wood, set up a stake and bound him to the stake.
As they prepared to set the wood on fire to cook up their catch, they noticed that he was missing a thumb. Being superstitious, they wouldn’t eat anyone who was less than whole. So they untied the king and sent him on his way.
When he returned home, he remembered how he’d lost his thumb and felt remorse for his treatment of his friend. He went directly to the jail to speak with him.
“You were right,” he said, “it was good that my thumb was blown off.” And he proceeded to tell the friend all that had just happened. “And so I am very sorry for sending you to jail for so long. It was bad for me to do this.”
“No,” his friend replied, “This is good!”
“What do you mean, ‘This is good’? How could it have been good that I sent you, my friend to jail for a year?”
“If I had not been in jail, I would have been with you, wouldn’t I?”
The moral…
Things may not always seem pleasant while we’re experiencing them, but then it depends the way you see them…or reflect on the later.
Like Steve Jobs said in his wonderful 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”
- Think positive thoughts and positive things will happen 
