The Recipe for Life’s Lemonade
Each and every one of us has been and will be handed lemons from life.
Perhaps life wasn’t even kind enough, and just threw the lemons at you like it often did to me.
Most of us aren’t sure what to do with all these lemons, so we just let them sit there and rot.
Life didn’t intend for that to happen. Life wants us to make lemonade, but doesn’t give a recipe for it.
For years I waited for the recipe to come, but then I decided to take it into my own hands, rolled up my sleeves, and created a sweet, delicious, and refreshing recipe for lemonade using life’s lemons.
I call it Life’s Lemonade.
The ingredients
- Patience
- Positivity and a good sense of humor
- Hope
- Self-reflection
- Goals and dreams
- Adversity and failure
Directions
First, get together your goals and dreams. They’re your pitcher and glasses for the lemonade to go into because if you want to take adversity and turn it into something sweet, you’ll also need something that the lemonade can be used in, drank and benefited from.
Next, you need to juice life’s lemons.
Take the biggest adversities you’ve ever been dealt throughout your life. Don’t think about any of the negatives that you’ve obtained from them, you need to reap what’s good about these lemons.
Add in a little self-reflection while you juice these lemons. Think of similar questions to these:
- How have I grown stronger from the adversity?
- What tough lessons did I learn?
- What did it teach me about myself? Am I stronger than I think? Smarter than I think?
- What did the adversity teach me about others?
Now that you’ve got a lot of juice, you need to toss in sugar for sweetness. For sugar in life’s lemonade you need to tap into positivity and a good sense of humor.
Adversities are really just opportunities in harder to open packages. And like any opportunities in life, you need to be in a positive and open-minded state to seize such chances. They won’t be captured when you’re in a bad mood and your head is down, because you won’t even see the opportunities.
Now it’s time to fill your “pitcher” with some cold water.
When cold water is dumped on you, it gets your attention, shocks you a bit, and gets your blood pumping. To get yourself pumped up, you need some inspiration to get you off your seat.
Here are a few stories and videos of people who battled tremendous odds and came out on top.
- Nick Vujicic
- Dick and Rick Hoyt
- Jason McElwain
Dump the inspiration from these amazing individuals into your pitcher. Then the last ingredients you have to mix in are patience and hope.
Patience because life’s lemonade may not be ready right away; the ingredients need to chill and incorporate more. It takes time to see and enjoy the benefits of turning adversity into prosperity. But putting in hope will keep you positive and knowing that you will definitely reap the sweet lemonade, with time.
That’s it! It’s a simple recipe for complicated problems, but in the end life’s lemonade turns out delicious and refreshing.
Photo by D Sharon Pruitt
6 Responses to “The Recipe for Life’s Lemonade”
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Andrew – as refreshing as summer’s lemonade itself, yet more lasting in its mindset-changing perspective. I love goals and dreams and the pitcher, the vehicle. Write on!
- Jamie
Thanks so much for the compliments Jamie! Glad it refreshed your mind
-Andrew
How can you not love life after reading the recipe and looking at the clips?
I don’t know Fred
The clips are especially motivating and inspiring. If you aren’t moved, you aren’t human.
-Andrew
I like that you included adversity and failure…and patience. We want everything right now. “making lemonade” is something that can take time. lemons rock!
Yeah, you’ve got to let it chill and infuse together better. Sometimes in life, we need to “chill out” too.
-Andrew