If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

Wayne Dyer

A short story:

I almost went from being irritated because of something to being angry at somebody (unrelated to the something) today. There was this guy that was trying to do something in a far more complex way than he should have.

He was at it for a while and it didn’t quite come out how he wanted to.

I was already  a little edgy because of a problem that I had no control over and that edginess fueled my anger toward the poor guy… I thought ‘here’s this guy wasting valuable time on building something complex that can be done in 5 minutes with a simple hack’.

After a short argument I felt that I was getting too hot and restrained myself. I stopped and thought for a few seconds about how I was handling it.

The first thing that came to mind was that I was handling it wrong. Then I looked at him again and it hit me: “This guy isn’t wasting time. He is learning!“

After I started seeing it that way, everything changed. My anger vanished and I started working together with him, trying to achieve what he started.

Because it felt right. Because he wasn’t this other guy, wasting time… he was my friend, learning.