You learn such interesting things about the world of pro-fighting. Every now and then you get things that qualify as ‘life lessons’, or maybe even (and this might stretch things a bit) ‘wisdom’.

For example, I remember Dustin Poirier once telling me that when times are tough, the days only seem unbearable when you try to live them all at once. And I often remind myself of something the late Robert Follis said to his fighters when they started worrying too much about upcoming fights: If we’re going to make up for the future, we might as well make it up to our advantage.

So when I interviewed Michael Chandler this past week ahead of his co-main event fight at UFC 309 on Saturday, the first thing I asked him was how he could be so relentlessly positive. I didn’t ask because I thought it was necessarily relevant to the story I was writing, but because I just wanted to know. A general feeling of positivity does not come naturally to me. I wondered if it was a trait that some people are just born with.

“I think it’s a combination of things,” Chandler said.

For starters, he suspects he learned it from his parents. “I grew up in a lower-middle-class family. My mom and dad worked two or three jobs, and you never heard them complain. You worked, you showed up, and that was it. You made the best of every situation and worked hard.”

But what really stood out to me was Chandler’s insistence that gratitude is the key to staying positive.

“Gratitude is a choice,” Chandler said. “I try to link everything to gratitude. You can decide to focus on the things that didn’t go the way you wanted, or you can choose to be grateful for the life you have. If something bad happens to you, but something good comes out of it – whether that good is that you became stronger through the experience, that you learned something, that you grew as a person – was it really a bad thing?

Famed fight trainer Greg Jackson once told me that fighters should be optimists. There are so many ways things can go wrong in this sport. This applies during the fights themselves, but also outside the cage. You can blow out an ACL during training. You can get a bad scorecard from the judges. The big money fight you’ve been waiting years for can disappear based on nothing more than a hurt toe. But if you want to survive in MMA, you have to believe that good things will happen for you – even if they may be disguised as bad things at first.

When I first heard that from Jackson, I assumed he meant that fighters should be the kind of people who are naturally optimistic. It didn’t occur to me that it might be a more conscious choice, or that any of us might simply decide to be more grateful, positive, and hopeful.

Because if you’re going to invent the future, you might as well do it to your advantage. And when you have to crawl into the cage against Charles Oliveira with the future of your career on the line, you probably better believe you worked hard to earn a few good breaks.