#Optimism January 18

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Recently I came across a quote during my morning leadership reading about OPTIMISM.

Lucy MacDonald is an anger and stress management specialist who has written a lot of books. Here is her quote on OPTIMISM that I loved.

“It’s not that optimism solves all of life’s problems; it is just that it can sometimes make the difference between coping and collapsing.”

Yesterday’s post was on all the things that might be FUTILE. On January 12th I wrote about how our most productive years as a human occur after age 60. There is a fine line between accepting something is futile and being full of optimism. Today I want to retell a story about a man who stared down that question. What choice would you make if the circumstances described below, was your life.

The Down and Out Senior Citizen

What if you were retired in your sixties, broke, living in a small house on $99.00 a month Social Security check and possessed hope there was a better way. What would you do?

This story is about a man from Kentucky who lived to be 90 and what he did the last twenty-five years of his life is how most people remember him today. In fact, his image is iconic in America and around the world.

At age 60 he began to evaluate what he did well. He friends said he was a pretty darn good cook. He decided to see if he could get restaurants to use his recipe for a percentage of the profits. He traveled the country cooking up batches of his fried chicken just hoping someone would pay him 5 cents for each chicken sold.

All of this was taking place in the 1950’s and one memorable trip took him to Salt Lake City, UT. The primary reason wasn’t to hawk his recipe, but he was traveling to a Christian Retreat in Australia and Utah happened to be on his way. So, on Aug. 3, 1952, our retired OPTIMISTIC recipe entrepreneur named Colonel Harland Sanders of Corbin, Kentucky, arrived in Utah to visit Pete Harman and his wife, Arline.

Read their fascinating story here

Pete and the Colonel had met the year before at the National Restaurant Association convention in Chicago. Both men owned and operated small restaurants that carried their names – Harman Café in Salt Lake City and Sanders Cafe in Corbin, KY.

When you read the story above you will realize that the first KFC was located at Harman Café address 3900 South and State St in Salt Lake City UT

Optimistic Choices

Despite being what our society would say about his age, the Colonel he made a choice. Despite being almost broke, he made a choice. Colonel Sanders made a choice to be OPTIMISTIC.