This week’s Monday Morning Message from Wm. H. Danforth, founder of Ralston Purina:
What is the Monday Morning Message?
Our mill grinds only what is put into it. Put in good grain and good products come out. Put in rotten grain and you get rotten products.
Put in nothing and you grind air—and rattle. Imagine yourself a mill for a week. What are you going to grind?
Good or Bad Thoughts? Good or Bad Words? Good or Bad Deeds? Or nothing—and rattle?
In computer programmer lingo, this is known as “garbage in, garbage out.”
What raw materials do you put into your brain?
So much of what passes for entertainment is uninspiring, negative and just plain nasty. No one’s life is made better by watching “Jersey Shore.” Do the programs you watch make you feel better or worse? If they are focused on showing people at their worst, turn them off. The same thing goes for music, magazines and, yes, even the news. You should be informed, but the latest scare from TV news does not help you to be informed and it will not bring on good thoughts.
Are the people you associate with upbeat and positive, or do they always find the dark lining in every silver cloud? Does every sentence contain at least one profanity? Do they try to pump themselves up by putting others down with gossip?
Always look for opportunities to feed your brain with good stuff. Avoid the negative, the angry, the unhappy. “Our mill grinds only what is put into it.”