The first impact of owning your life and taking responsibility for all your actions that you will notice will be on your attitude. You can’t complain you can’t blame. If you are late for the class or a meeting you cannot blame it on a flat tyre or bad traffic. You cannot postpone the date of submitting your assignment because you fell ill. You cannot even blame a bad teacher for the low grades you get. In school you perhaps could have because the teacher was responsible for making you learn. Not at this level. Now you are responsible. So you figure out how are you are going to learn. One of the first things I tell my class right at the beginning of the new session is that I am a bad teacher and that they better pull all their resources to get good results. It scares those who have not yet taken ownership of their lives. Others know better.

You cannot complain that you were born poor or that you did not get to go to a renowned school or that you were a sickly child and that your friends bullied you. That time has passed. That time is over. You cannot weep, wale or whine. Today is the first day of the rest of your life and you can take the first step towards achieving whatever you set out to achieve. That is the attitude you have to have because you are only an attitude away from success. You cannot go through life thinking about your past failure. You have to count your blessings and make the best of the hand you have been dealt.

I am sure none of us have been dealt a hand as bad as Victor Frankl. Victor E. Frankl was a Jew born in Vienna, Austria in 1905. A brilliant student he grew up in Vienna and studied psychiatry and medicine. In 1930 he joined a hospital there as a young doctor. When Germany seized control of Austria eight years later, the Nazis made Frankl head of the Rothschild Hospital.

Frankl got married in 1942 and nine months later, he was arrested for being a Jew along with his parents and wife. They were deported to a concentration camp near Prague. Even though Frankl was in four Nazi camps, he survived the Holocaust, including Auschwitz in Poland from 1942-45, where the incoming prisoners were divided into two lines. Those in the line moving left were to go to the gas chambers, while those in the line moving right were to be spared. Frankl was directed to join the line moving left, but managed to save his life by slipping into the other line without being noticed. Other members of his family were not so fortunate. Except for his sister his entire family perished in the in the concentration camps.

One day, naked and alone in a small prison cell, he realized that the Germans can torture him and take away every one of his material possessions but one thing they cannot take away is his freedom - freedom to respond to what they did to him. He determined that he and he alone, not his captors, will decide how his circumstances will affect him. He decided that he will choose the response to whatever is done to him. “The last of human freedoms,” he said, “is to choose one’s attitude in any set of circumstances.” Even in extreme cases while he was being tortured by the Nazis he would retreat into his mind and picture himself as lecturing to his students or examining a patient. He grew so much in stature because of his confidence in himself and his thinking that his captors just could not conquer his mind. He not only survived the Holocaust but went on to lead a very successful life, influencing millions of people not only by his example but also as a mentor and motivator.

People who will be successful do not wait for the weather to be good before they go out they take their sunshine along wherever they go. They do not wait to feel good before they act; they act and feel good that they took action. They do not whine that they have been given a raw deal. If they get lemons they make lemonade. What kind of an attitude are you going to have now that you know that you are just an attitude away from success.