Give 100% of yourself to the task at hand. Do your best every time.

A study on happiness identified six common features for fulfilment, one of the most revealing of which was that happy people have work or leisure activities that engage their skills. They enjoy what they do because it engages them.

Being engaged grounds us in the ‘now’ and enables us to maximise the experience of the moment. The whole situation we’re in becomes positively enhanced. Have you ever been to a store to enquire about some product, or checked into a hotel after a very long journey, or maybe been seated at a dinner beside a stranger, and the person you are meeting for the very first time is clearly bored, uninterested and would rather not be there. He or she answers your questions functionally and you sense they’d rather you went away and stopped bothering them. They are not thinking about the task in hand; the chances are their minds are somewhere else.

The best efforts of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

You do not need a post graduate medical degree from Vienna to conclude that these folks are not very happy with their current situation. The reason does not matter – but the outcome of meeting them does. They turn a chance encounter into a memorable experience for all the wrong reasons. They may not like their boss, have been made to work a double shift, or have just come out of a difficult relationship the day before – it doesn’t matter . The fact that they are rude, distant or uninterested does – because they chose to be so. No one made them react to the situation as they did. They chose to treat the experience as boring, pointless and forgettable.

They could have chosen instead to take the opportunity to have a great moment with you, to have taken responsibility for giving you their full attention and doing their best to serve you well, not because it is their job, but because they want to do their best.

You will have shop assistants who went out of their way to help. A hotel clerk who made you feel as though you were coming home, and strangers at a social event who made you feel as though you are one of the most interesting people in the world. We have all met people who are attentive, make the most of every situation, have a positive attitude. They too made a choice.

Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.
Wayne Dyer (1940 – 2015)

Why are so many people are unhappy with their work, their relationships and their lives? Is there a more demoralising comment than someone saying, “What’s the point?”

The point is, if you put nothing in to your bank account then obviously you can take nothing out. If you put no time or effort into a relationship, then you too will get nothing out of it, and the same is true of life.

If we do not do our best, if our efforts are just going through the motions, if our hearts and souls are absent then we are not putting very much in. When we really try by contrast we will feel differently, we will experience raised self-esteem, and we will make a difference.

If a man is called to be a street-sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street-sweeper who did his job well.

Martin Luther King  (1929 – 1968)

We should all try to do our very best in every situation, to be fully present in the moment. In so doing we maximise our opportunity to succeed, we create positive memories for ourselves to draw on.

Muhammad Ali said that if he had been a street sweeper, he would have tried to be the best street sweeper in the world. He would have done his best to be the “greatest”, at whatever he applied himself too.

We can too.