By | Tony Robbins | #1 New York Times best-selling author, life and business strategist, philanthropist, entrepreneur
Graduation day is a period of excitement, of anticipation. It’s the day you look forward to for years, perhaps decades, where you get to celebrate your accomplishments and look ahead to the next phase of your life with optimism. A life full of experiences, of future milestones like your first job, buying your first home, maybe settling down with a partner, your loved one, and starting your new life.
But for many students today, graduation might feel like a letdown. A disappointment. Maybe you had expectations of already having the job of your dreams, or moving to a new city and that’s no longer possible, or even just having a big party that never happened. Disappointment either destroys you or drives you, and it’s up to you to decide which.
To get to where you are today, it’s taken a tremendous amount of focus, sacrifice, hard work, and perhaps most of all, discipline. I encourage you now to channel that skill of discipline, of trained self-control, to take the disappointment you feel turn it into gratitude for what you do have, instead of focusing on what’s missing.
It’s so easy to focus on what you don’t have. But what we have now is a world that is opening back up and an economy that is gaining momentum. We have each other. We have a chance to be healthy and strong. We have ways to change our world – we have our creativity, our courage, and our intelligence. We have anything we want to make happen.
If you trade your expectations for appreciation, your whole world changes in an instant.
