Teens are often confronted with a lot of changes at once. And without the right attitude, these changes can derail them from reaching their goals. From changes in relationships to the pressure of grades, tests and transcripts to bigger life challenges in their home or work life, teens face a number of opportunities to practice a positive attitude.

But often this attitude doesn’t come naturally. A person has to work at it. So teaching teens to look on the bright side of things, to let life roll off their back a little, is a valuable skill. Here are some things you can talk to them about.

A great way to start looking at life in a more upbeat way is to count your blessings. Are you thankful for your family, friends, home or job? Make a list of all the things you’re grateful for and post it where you can see it every day. As you review your list daily, you’ll change your mindset from complaining about what you don’t have to feeling blessed for all you do have.

You’ll carry this positive approach into the rest of your day. When obstacles arise, you’ll be more prepared to see the solutions rather than focusing on the downsides. You’ll be less prone to worrying and more apt to hope for good outcomes.

Try using some new vocabulary to push this transition even further. Instead of telling yourself you’re bad at math, tell yourself that you’re practicing your math skills and will do better next time. Instead of beating yourself up for missing the goal, remind yourself of the great assist you made during the game. And rather than worry about what will happen with your college entrance applications, remind yourself of the great time you had in high school and of your ability to enjoy yourself no matter where you end up.

A report by Civic Enterprises published in 2010 shows that nearly one-third of all public-high-school students, and almost half of minority students, fail to graduate with their class. The report details the ever-increasing “downward spiral of failure, from boredom in the classroom and occasionally skipping class, to long absences from school, engaging in risky behaviors and becoming part of a subculture that thinks it is cool to drop out.”

Often, these behaviors are a result of a negative attitude, a philosophy about life that doesn’t leave room for growth. Failures are seen as permanent and teens are so hard on themselves and so sure that nothing will improve, they stop trying.

Does everything seem to go wrong for you? Do you feel like everyone is against you? Or do you just wonder why no matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to reach your goals?

Maybe it’s time for an attitude check.

The right attitude can help teens handle failure. Shift your perspective to see that lessons are only learned by falling down. If you’d never fallen, you never would’ve learned to walk. If you’d never failed, you never would’ve tossed a ball into a basket. Failure is a way to earn feedback on your performance and improve it.

The teens that persevere, graduate high school and go on to pursue their dreams are the ones who understand that winners learn the lessons from failure and get up again. They take the risk of looking foolish now and then so they can learn something; they see themselves as capable of change.

All of this is about attitude. Everyone experiences failure and disappointment. But your positive attitude can pull you through, help you see the value in each experience and move you toward something better.

Our relationships with history’s greatest innovators and influencers usually are developed in a classroom or during an hour-long documentary. Imagine having an entire evening, some appetizers, wine and steak with one of them. What would you say? Would you ask the obvious: What inspires you? Or would you go for gossip: Did you really have a thing for Amelia Earhart? Every month SUCCESS is going to “sit down to dinner” with one of the world’s greatest minds and ask a few questions of our own.

We recently had haggis (that’s Scottish sheep sausage to you and me) with Alexander Graham Bell, who was awarded U.S. Patent No. 174,465, a sequence of six numbers that officially launched the telephone. Though the phone is Graham’s most noted invention, he also innovated in areas of aeronautics, transportation, medical research and alternative fuels. And each of his innovations sprang from his desire, at least initially, to better understand sound and speech.

Q: Did you inherit your scientific mind from your parents or did you just wake up one day and think, “Today would be a good day to revolutionize communication”?

A: “A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with—a man is what he makes of himself.”

Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847. His brother, father and grandfather all researched and studied elocution and speech. They greatly influenced Bell’s decision to explore elocution—clear speaking—as did his mother, who started losing her hearing when Bell was a boy. Many of his experiments were driven by a desire to communicate with his mother and collaborate with his family.

While Bell was certainly influenced by his surroundings, his obsessive interest in science and unyielding work ethic impelled him to become a great inventor. He spent his time exploring, experimenting and devising ways to improve existing technologies and people’s everyday lives. When he was 12, Bell built a corn de-husking machine for a local miller who had complained that manual de-husking was laborious and time consuming.

Like many innovators, Bell indulged all of his passions. If he had an interest, he explored it. He learned to read music and taught himself ventriloquism to entertain guests.

His varied interests often led to new inventions. His success with minor mechanical inventions like the de-husker and his understanding of the way ventriloquism and music manipulate sound all led to his eventual creation of the telephone.

Q: You didn’t exactly follow the crowd when it came to getting your education and finding a job. What would you tell others who yearn to take the road less traveled?

A: “Leave the beaten track behind occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do, you will be certain to find something you have never seen before.”

Bell left school at 15 (his record was undistinguished) to stay with his grandfather in London. There, his grandfather fueled his scientific curiosity, and Bell spent more time learning and studying than in the classroom. At 16, he became a student and teacher of elocution at the Weston House Academy in Scotland. By 19, he had an idea to produce vowel sounds electronically, and he made an observation that set the tone for the rest of his life’s work: He determined that if he could produce consonants, he could electronically “articulate speech.”

Q: There must have been a lot of pressure to say the right thing when you finally tested the first working telephone. What were the first words you spoke?

A: “Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.”

Bell really started working on the concept of the telephone in 1871, five years before the patent was approved. He started work on his harmonic telegraph, a device that would allow multiple messages (rather than one at a time) to pass through a single wire by use of a transmitter and receiver. While he worked on the device, he opened the School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech in Boston and tutored several students. Stretched thin and unable to fully engage in his experiments, he turned his full attention back to his laboratory in 1874.

Following the success of the harmonic telegraph, Bell developed an acoustic telegraph (one that transmitted vocal notes) and embarked upon a patent race with Elisha Gray, who was working on an acoustic telegraph that relied on a water transmitter. The two got their patent applications in on the same date in 1876, but Bell won the patent, leading many to claim he stole Gray’s design.

Three days after getting his patent, Bell “phoned” his assistant, Thomas Watson, who had sat on the receiving end of countless failed attempts at telephone communication before hearing Bell’s voice.

Q: As an inventor you suffered many failures before attaining your many successes. What advice do you have for those who have met failure?

A: “When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”

Critics not only tore apart Bell’s successes, they also celebrated his failures. In 1881, Bell, his asssistant Sumner Tainter, and mathematician Simon Newcomb claimed to have developed a device that could locate bullets lodged in a person’s body. President James Garfield had just been shot and doctors were hoping to find a way to locate the bullet without using traditional means of trial and error, which was all that was available to them at the time.

The two men invented and experimented with a device that hummed when in close proximity to metal. They tried it on their own bodies by hiding bullets under their arms and locating them with the device. They were successful when they used it on themselves, but when they tried it on the president, it hummed nonstop. Bell was highly criticized for the failure. Later it was realized that Garfield’s bed had thrown off the device. Much of it was metal.

Though Bell technically failed to find the Garfield bullet, he’s credited with the invention of the metal detector.

Q: Spending hours on end in a lab seems like it might get dull. Did you ever get bored?

A: “There cannot be mental atrophy in any person who continues to observe, to remember what he observes, and to seek answers for his unceasing hows and whys about things.”

Anyone who saw Bell at work might have dismissed his antics as a waste of time, but his willingness to try anything and test his powers of observation led to many successful inventions. He and a brother once fooled visitors into believing their Skye terrier, Trouve, could say, “How are you, Grandma?” While they played it off as a practical joke, playtime with Trouve was actually an experiment in sound transmission. The Bell brothers would get the dog to growl then teach it to manipulate its mouth and vocal cords so it sounded as if the dog was asking after Grandma.

To some, playing with a dog was a waste of time. To Bell, it yielded insight into the complexities of sound transmission.

Q: Do you feel that your inventions are precursors for things like computers or smartphones?

A: “Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds. I may be given credit for having blazed the trail, but when I look at the subsequent developments, I feel the credit is due to others rather than to myself.”

Bell knew better than anyone the importance of collaborating with other innovators and building off their innovations. Many of his 30 patents (a number of which were shared with colleagues) resulted from working with others or improving innovations.

And though Bell didn’t live to see its universal impact, his most famous invention certainly became the impetus for many more.

“Just do your work.” That advice from a high-school drama teacher hit home with Matt Damon. The young actor knew doing his best— even if no one else seemed to notice—was the only way to succeed.

Even if it meant losing 40 pounds in 100 days to play a heroin addicted Gulf War veteran in the 1996 film Courage Under Fire—a decision others cautioned him against for health reasons. Or devoting a year to writing the critically acclaimed Good Will Hunting. Or spending hours on the firing range and learning to box so he’d know how to carry himself in the role of a trained killer in the 2002 film The Bourne Identity. Or going with police on a drug raid in preparation to play a dirty cop in The Departed in 2006.

In most cases, Damon reaped rewards for his preparation and hard work. The studios waged a bidding war for the script for Good Will Hunting, which landed an Academy Award for best original screenplay, as well as several other nominations. He received some 30 script offers within a week after The Bourne Identity opened.
But although he had poured himself into his role for Courage Under Fire, his performance garnered little attention from critics. Damon was crushed that his sacrifice was for nothing. Then came a chance meeting with a legendary director.

While filming Good Will Hunting, co-star Robin Williams introduced the young actor to Steven Spielberg, who recognized Damon but couldn’t place him. “He said, ‘What movie have you been in?’ ” Damon recalls in an Inside the Actors Studio interview. “I said, ‘I was in Courage Under Fire.’ He said, ‘I loved you in that movie. I
was thinking I wanted you to play Private Ryan, but I thought you were too skinny.’ ”

And that, says Damon, was how Spielberg cast him in the title role of the 1998 blockbuster, Saving Private Ryan. It turned out doing the work was all the preparation Damon needed.

Preparing for Greatness

Want to increase your learning and earning potential? Prepare and persist.

Learn while you commute.
Listening to educational audios while commuting 12,000 miles annually for three years can be equivalent to two years of college study.
Read up.
While experts debate the number of books you must read to make you an expert on a topic (somewhere between 3 and 300), many tout reading as the key to success.
Teach someone what you know.
Teaching others reinforces your own abilities, helps you look at a subject in different ways and inspires you to learn your subject inside and out.
Practice, practice, practice.
But remember Vince Lombardi’s advice: “Only perfect practice makes perfect.”

Do the New Year’s resolutions you make really reflect your personal goals? Or are you just making the same resolutions as every other 47-year-old college grad in your tax bracket?

A study by the Barna Group says that certain demographics are more likely to make certain resolutions. Here were the most common resolutions people made for 2011 and the types of people who tended to make them:

(Source: Barna Group Omni Poll 2011)

So are you making the same resolutions as others like you? If you are, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What’s important is making resolutions you can stick to.

The study also found that 61 percent of Americans have made New Year’s resolutions in the past. Of those, about one in four say they experienced significant, long-term change as a result. But half saw no change at all.

To give yours staying power over the long haul, be specific, write them down and try to build in a way to measure progress—with weekly check-ins, time requirements, etc. By February, you could be feeling results instead of regrets.

Lose the Spare Tire

Resolve to be healthier with these fitness apps.

⇒ Editor’s Pick

SUCCESS Managing Editor Amy Anderson uses MyFitnessPal to log her workouts, monitor calories and track wellness goals. “My favorite part of the app is the endless database of nutrition info that includes everything from restaurant faves to my morning cereal,” she says. “I can see my total calories for the day, plus find out if I’ve gotten enough calcium or protein in my diet.” Free for Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile.

→ SportyPal—No matter how you’re exercising, this app will measure your distance, speed and calories burned, then sync your data with your profile and display your stats. Plus, hikers and bikers can create outdoor topographical maps. Free for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Windows Mobile.

→ iFitness—Scan through the illustrated catalog of over 300 exercises from ab crunches to the Arnold press. Watch how-to videos and create a custom workout, or use one of 20 designed by fitness experts. $1.99 for iOS.

Save Some Spare Change

Leave the clipping at the craft table with mobile coupon apps.

⇒ Editor’s Pick

SUCCESS Web Editor Shelby Skrhak uses Shopkick to download mobile coupons for stores like Best Buy, Target and American Eagle Outfitters. “I collect points for checking into stores, scanning products and inviting friends to join,” she says. “The points are redeemable for gift cards.” Free for Android, iOS.

→ Cellfire—No need for an accordion file of paper scraps with this app that downloads grocery coupons direct to your mobile device or to your grocery member card. Simply swipe your card at checkout to apply discounts. Free for Android, iOS.

→ CouponSherpa—From grocery coupons to discounts at big-box stores, this mobile version of a tried and true source for printable coupons will help you climb to the summit of savings! Free for Android, iOS.