by Tony Rushin
“Ex-prisoner En Route to Job Interview Takes Shirt Off Back to Save Man’s Life” – what a refreshing headline to find in our mostly negative media world. It showed up on my Good News Network daily feed a few days ago.
About five years ago an attorney friend of mine, Mitesh Patel, shared that his household had quit TV. When I asked why he said, “I found that I was watching, and listening to, the news every day and it was negatively affecting my mood. My wife and I discussed the negative impact – especially what it must be doing to our children – and decided to turn off the TV’s completely.” Mitesh went on to tell me that he also stopped listening to news on the radio and found, after about a week, that he definitely noticed that his mood shifted from negative to positive.
What Mitesh shared made sense to me but sounded too radical: I couldn’t imagine giving up sports on TV and my wife couldn’t imagine giving up HGTV. However, it was a fairly easy decision to stop watching the news on TV and stop listening to the news on the radio since they are both so heavily negative. I still get my fill of sports on TV (and even join Luann to watch Househunters at times) and I listen to sports talk radio whenever I’m driving. Still, I needed to keep up with what was going on in the world so I turned to reading the news online. And, thanks to Richard’s Flipboard tip back in 2012, I was able to easily access the news topics and sources I prefer.
Fast forward to earlier this year. I was still reading the news every morning via my Flipboard app when one day it hit me: the media has gotten much more negative than it used to be. I’m a firm believer that much of what goes on in the world is positive. I see too many good things happen every day – at work, home, with friends, out and about in Atlanta – to believe otherwise. Yet the good stuff was hardly ever making it into the news I was reading. That’s when I started looking for an outlet that features positive news stories. It didn’t take long for me to find the Good News Network. This quote from Tal Ben-Shahar, the Harvard professor who created the most popular class in Harvard’s history, was all I needed to decide:
“The Good News Network is an extremely important initiative. I recommend that each person makes it a habit to visit the website at least once a day. Positive information benefits us emotionally, physically, and mentally. It can contribute in a meaningful way to a happier and healthier life.”
And what about the ex-prisoner who took the shirt off his back to help save a man’s life? Well, he didn’t get that job, since he missed the interview. However, when people learned about this Good Samaritan, he quickly had three other job offers. You can read the whole story about this hero, Aaron Tucker, right here on the Good News Network.
