Reddit mentions of Attitude Is Everything: Change Your Attitude... Change Your Life!

I get the point of the first paragraph, but the second paragraph is worth diving into a bit more, for several reasons:

1. It's no one's job to make you feel happy, valued, or appreciated. I'm not saying that to be harsh; that's just reality. As kids, most of us get taken care of by our parents, but as adults, we have to proactively choose to invite & maintain happiness in our lives, for the most part.
   
2. Well, it is someone's job to make you happy, technically - it's your job! More on that in a minute.
   
3. You might get lucky & find a life partner who is willing to speak your love language or a boss who puts in regular efforts to make you feel valued, and while those are definitely nice things to have, you really don't want to be dependent on someone else constantly creating a nice environment for you to be happy. I mean, that'd be living the dream, but that mindset also puts unrealistic & unfair expectations on other people to provide you with validation & happiness all the time.
   
4. Thus, I think it's far better to proactively take control of your own happiness, instead of being reactive & expecting other people & environments to make you happy
   
   However:
   
   
5. That isn't to say that you shouldn't surround yourself with good people & good places.
   
6. Supportive, genuine people are always welcome & can be hard to come by.
   
7. Everyone likes being cared for & appreciated.
   
   The outliers to this include:
   
   
8. Even in the crappiest situations, you still retain control over your attitude, as evidenced in Viktor Frankl's "Man's search for meaning" book, who was a man who lived in Hitler's death camps for months & found a way for that experience not to beat him into submission somehow. That doesn't mean he ran around grinning like an idiot during the Holocaust, but rather recognized that even in a bad situation, his attitude could always make it worse, and that was a choice he had to make.
   
9. Some people & environments are, in fact, toxic. Abusive households & relationships, toxic work environments, etc. There are narcissists, sociopaths, and all kinds of difficult personalities you will encounter throughout your time on this rock. Learning to recognize when a situation is bad because of how you think about it vs. bad because it's a terrible setup is something that kind of has to be practiced & experienced to get good at knowing when to quit it.
   
10. Many people struggle with feeling bad about stuff in the first paragraph because of things like anxiety, low self-esteem, doubt, etc.
    
    So I think it's important to clarify the message:
    
    
11. No one is going to make you happy but you, which means both choosing how to control your attitude & being willing to be open to accepting help, love, and support from other people. There's a great quote by Eleanor Roosevelt that goes “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent", meaning that while negative things may sting, ultimately you have to decide if you're going to internalize it or let it roll off your back like water off a duck. There's a great book by Jeff Keller called "Attitude is Everything" that talks about how much an attitude change can actually change your experience in life!
    
12. You're stuck with certain things in life, but you're also free to invite better things into your life & to "fire" bad things out of your life. It can be hard to swallow that pill mentally, because some situations seem to dictate how we should react & we can feel powerless when faced with them, but whereas feelings are things we simply have, emotions come form thoughts, and by changing our thoughts, we can change how we feel. I think it's really important to understand the difference between feelings & emotions & where they come from, because it provides more clarity & control over how you feel.
    
    TL;DR - commitment, circumstances, and attitude have far more to do with staying in places where you're not necessarily happy, valued, or appreciated. There is a fine line between difficult situations & truly toxic & abusive situations, which requires being honest with yourself & really seeing the situation for how it is & how you're personally dealing with it.
    
    Again, that doesn't mean turning into an island & becoming a closed-off person, because everyone on the planet needs some degree of support & validation, but it does mean learning how to not be dependent solely on other people & situations for your happiness, because learning how to deal with crappy situations like an adult is just part of the maturity process.
    
    Should you stay in a toxic & abusive environment? No, of course not. Should you bail just because things get hard & no one seems to care about you anymore? Well, it depends on your commitment, as well as what kind of effort you're personally putting into the situation.

I'll have Amazon deliver the things I talked about it in a browser:. https://www.amazon.com/Attitude-Everything-Change-Your-Life/dp/0979041031. It's a pretty good sumation that you don't have to put into one sentence but essentially the same dynamic.