Back in 2004, I was fresh out of college, unemployed and living in a strange place, finding myself increasingly desperate for lousier and lousier work. After missing out on a number of opportunities, I wrote to one of my former professors seeking advice. His response was exactly four words long:

Be positive and resolute.

For the first day or two after I received his email, I kind of forgot about it, writing it off as a hasty response to one of probably a hundred emails this professor probably has to deal with in any given day. As days turned into weeks, the words sort of started to sink in for me. Be positive and resolute. Those were both attributes of successful people – of winners – and I was being neither to any great extent. Be positive and resolute. There are so many things in your life every day that you have absolutely no control over, but you have absolute control over both of those things. You can choose to be positive at any given time, and you can choose to be resolute in your actions. It started to become a mantra of sorts for me. I changed my own attitude, took the chip off my shoulder. The more positivity I placed in my approach to everything and everyone in my life, the more positive things began to happen around me. The more resolute I chose to be in setting and pursuing goals, the more success became an eventuality as opposed to a possibility. Failure became a part of the process of eventual success rather than an outcome. Be positive and resolute. Every day, when I encounter a challenge or don’t know what to do, I think of those four words and use them as my sort of ‘default guidance system,’ because they’re the two things that I know I can always control and that will always bring me just a little bit closer to where I need to be. Just four little words.

Every morning, there’s a recurring task in my to-do program. Be positive and resolute. I hope that when you approach your next challenge, those words can help you as much as they’ve helped me.