By Jeremy Newcombe 

I recently had a chance to sit down and chat with an old friend of mine named Fran. I find Fran’s story to be very inspirational, and I thought it might be a good idea to share it here so that more people can benefit from his wisdom.

Up to a just over a year ago Fran had spent his life working in a kitchen. He is an excellent chef. He had been working in the food industry since he was a teenager, studied at culinary school, and was generally doing well for himself in the restaurant business. The problem was, he simply wasn’t happy. Now, Fran is a very pragmatic person. Even though he wasn’t happy in his job he knew he wasn’t exactly suffering either. He made decent money and worked with good people; cooking just wasn’t satisfying him on a personal level. It led to an important decision in his life; should he remain a chef, living a decent life, or should he take a risk and change his career, possibly achieving something better but taking on a great deal of uncertainty in the process?

Now, this isn’t exactly a novel story, but what I found really fascinating about Fran was how his positive outlook made all the difference for him when he decided to make a change. Instead of being scared of altering course after he’d been doing a certain job for most of his life, he saw it as a fresh beginning and really embraced the change. He left the kitchen and started reorganizing his life. He said he wanted to go through each aspect of his life and find out what was important to him so he could start living the life he wanted.

“What would make the best person I could be,” he asked me rhetorically, “I wanted to find those things and maximize them.” This started with the basic way he went about looking at his day. “At every point in your day you have a choice,” he went on, “You can either see things in a positive or a negative light.” It’s difficult, he conceded, but just like exercising your body you have to continually condition your mind to see how things can be viewed positively. He even suggested making a mantra for yourself as an easy way to remind yourself to be positive. Happiness, he said, starts on a day to day level. When you wake up, organize simple goals that you know you can accomplish, and then things become much less complicated. That was the secret to his success. It almost sounds cheesy, but I can’t argue with the results. Today Fran is one of the happiest people I know, and he’s done remarkable things in terms of his health and his career in the year he has adopted this strategy.

If you want to try to follow this approach, here’s a few tips he gave me to pass along:

-  Be patient with yourself. Growth takes time.

-  Exercise your body and your mind equally.

-   You always have a choice to be positive or negative about your situation. Try to keep things in perspective.

-  Make small, practical goals you can accomplish every day.

-  It’s never too late to start making yourself happy in what you do.