Day 24

1.What is your favorite quotation and why? (Princeton)

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company... a church... a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you... we are in charge of our Attitudes.”

 -Charles Swindoll

                                                  

We were in the warm up room, just about to go onstage to a very important jazz band competition in Savannah, Georgia. We had been listening to many of the other bands in the competition play, and we were so worried that they were all so much better than us. Then, we walked into that room and starting playing. And we were so good. We starting smiling and we felt so happy. Our band director read us this quote, scrolling on the little screen on his iPhone to find it. And he told us that we couldn’t change anything that happened to us, what the judges thought, what the other bands sounded like, whether the microphones were working, whether we were applauded or booed. And it’s true, we were worrying so much about all these factors we couldn’t control. But we could control our attitudes. And that made me realize how much control I had over what I made of my life. It didn’t matter what happened, I had control. And we knew we had control in that moment, in that room. Over how we played. And we knew how well we could really play, with much soul and energy. We started smiling and laughing in that room. And as we played, we grew so happy just to be making beautiful music as a band. And then we started listening, more and more. So when we got onstage, we just swung and swung and played with so much style, everyone loved it. But it didn’t matter what happened. We had done our best and that was the only thing we could control. We ended up placing 2^nd in the competition. So the other 10% of life fell into line.