Thomas Watson Jr., former chairman of IBM, liked to tell anecdotes about his father, Thomas Watson Sr., who founded the company. One of them went like this: "Father was fond of saying that everybody, from time to time, should take a step back and watch himself go by."

This was the elder Watson's way of saying that everyone needs to step back once in a while to check their perspective. Good advice for everyone.

Perspective in business is important. Perspective in life is very important. Perspective has many definitions, such as the ability to understand what is important and what isn't. It's the capacity to view things in their true relation or relative importance.

Humorist Will Rogers once wrote on keeping one's perspective about other people: "You must never disagree with a man while you are facing him. Go around behind him and look the same way he is looking, and you will see that things look different from what they do when you're facing him. Look over his shoulder and get his viewpoint, then go back and face him and you will have a different idea."

Sometimes it seems all perspective is lost. Consider the current political season. Every side of every issue has a perspective -- often narrow -- that prevents civil discussion. Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu once summed it up: "Perspective gives us the ability to accurately contrast the large with the small, and the important with the less important. Without it we are lost in a world where all ideas, news and information look the same. We cannot differentiate, we cannot prioritize, and we cannot make good choices."

Businesses need to keep perspectives fresh or risk failure. Products may come and go, or they may have stood the test of time. Businesses that look at things from their customers' perspectives, rather than resisting change because "we've always done it this way," are more likely to be around for another generation of customers.

Let me give you an example. At our envelope company, our motto is "To be in business forever." The advent of email and paperless transactions certainly has impacted our customers in the ways they do business. Traditional correspondence and billing envelopes have declined. In response, what did we glean from our customers years ago? They advised us to focus on advertising mail, and we invested heavily in that direction. Today, direct mail (advertising mail) is on the rise and coexists and complements the internet.

The Japanese have a saying: You can't see the whole sky through a bamboo tube. In other words, look at the whole picture. Don't be too quick to judge. It's all in how you look at things. As the saying goes, all that glitters is not gold.

Staying with the precious metal theme, you also need to look for the silver lining. Problems will arise, plans will fall apart, and your parade will get rained on. But if you look hard enough -- not just through the bamboo tube -- you just might be able to find a blue sky.

Are you having trouble seeing the silver lining? Feeling burned out can negatively affect your life as well as your career. These techniques can help you regain your perspective and your passion:

-- Fill in the blanks: "In my life, I was once (blank) and now I (blank)." You'll find the answers very enlightening.

-- Reflect on the past. Figure out when you were happiest and what got you the most down. How does your perspective change when you compare your current situation with previous challenges?

-- List five or six principles that guide you in life, and decide whether they are values you truly live by or merely talk about.

-- Try writing a page or two on what you would like to do with the rest of your life. Don't worry about grammar, practicalities or priorities. Just create that dream list.

-- Record your thoughts, feelings and hopes, or tell them to a trusted friend. With someone to witness them, you'll feel responsible for making some changes.

Albert Einstein explained perspective in the simplest terms when he was asked for an explanation of his theory of relativity that would be meaningful to lay people. He wrote: "An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour."

Mackay's Moral: When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at often change.

One rainy night many years ago, a gentleman and his wife entered the lobby of a small hotel in Philadelphia. The man asked the clerk if he had any rooms available.

The clerk, who was actually the hotel manager, was a friendly man who prided himself on superior customer service. He said that unfortunately the hotel was completely booked. "However," he said, "rather than send you out in the rain at 1 a.m., I would be happy to offer you my room. It's not a suite, but it will be comfortable for the night."

The man tried to object, but the clerk insisted. The next morning, as he paid his bill, the gentleman said to the clerk: "You are the kind of manager who should be the boss of the best hotel in the United States."

Two years passed, but the two men stayed in touch. One day the clerk/manager received a letter from the guest, inviting him to New York for a visit and including a round-trip airline ticket. When the clerk/manager arrived in New York, the man met him and led him to the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. He pointed to a brand-new building. "There is the hotel I want you to manage," said the man.

"You must be joking," said the astonished clerk/manager.

"I can assure you that I am not," said the man, William Waldorf Astor, and the palace that he had built was the original Waldorf (later Waldorf-Astoria) Hotel.

The moral of this story is you never know when kindness will come full circle.

Kind words and kind actions start with kind thoughts. In a hyper-competitive world, we might be tempted to take a dramatically different approach. But that tactic doesn't produce any winners.

Mean people are not happier, or necessarily more successful. If you don't believe me, spend a few minutes on Twitter or Facebook. The comments are too frequently cruel or extreme, and they breed even more ugliness. That's the definition of "anti-social media."

Pastor and author C. Neil Strait said: "Kindness is more than deeds. It is an attitude, an expression, a look, a touch. It is anything that lifts another person."

It even extends to the animal kingdom! Great Britain's Newcastle University found that cattle treated with care and a "more personal touch" tended to produce more milk for farmers. The school studied over 500 farmers across the U.K. and -– believe it or not -- found that cows given names by their owners gave over 3.4 percent more milk in a year than cattle that were nameless.

Contrary to the old saying, nice people can finish first. The key is to know how to use kindness to your advantage. If you think you might need a refresher course, here are some steps you can take to make kindness a habit.

-- First, be kind to yourself. You'll find being nice to others easier if you build your self-respect with positive thoughts about your personality and achievements. When you are good to yourself, you are good to others.

-- Treat everyone with respect. Don't worry about who's on top. Treat everyone the way you want to be treated, regardless of their position or job title. No one is too big to be kind and courteous, but many people are too small.

-- Say no when necessary. You can't do everything. It's kinder to say no to something when you cannot devote adequate time or attention than to do a half-hearted job.

-- Plant seeds of kindness. Do something nice every day. Kindness pays most when you don't do it for payback.

-- Take the high road. Trust me, it's the road less traveled. It's a big, wide highway with no traffic jams. And no road rage.

There's an old story about a king who had a beautiful ring and three sons who each wanted it. When the king died, he left three rings for his sons and a note that said, "My dear sons, one of these rings is real, and two are fake. The way you will know who has the real ring is that the son with the real ring will be kind and generous to all people."

Each of the three sons spent the rest of his life being good to others -- to prove that he had the real ring.

Mackay's Moral: Funny thing about kindness: The more it's used, the more you have of it.

I will never forget the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta when Muhammad Ali was the surprise person to light the Olympic torch. I was sitting in the stadium, watching that spectacle with my entire family.

At the time, I was writing my third book, "Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty: The Only Networking Book You Will Ever Need." I wanted to intersperse stories from the best networkers in the world. I thought, who better than the Champ? But how would I get to him?

Remember the Broadway play and movie "Six Degrees of Separation"? The title refers to the belief that there's a chain of no more than six people that links every person on this planet to every other person.

I often use that strategy in tracking people down, and it came in handy again this time. John Y. Brown, the former Kentucky governor, is a good friend. He put me in touch with Howard Bingham, Muhammad's longtime photographer and best friend. Howard introduced me to Muhammad, and I flew to his beautiful 80-acre estate -- the former hideout of Al Capone -- in Berrien Springs, Michigan, and interviewed the Champ for six hours for my book.

But first, I did my homework and completed a "Mackay 66" on Muhammad. (The Mackay 66 Customer Profile is a 66-question synopsis, available for free on my website, www.harveymackay.com.) At MackayMitchell Envelope Co., we require all of our salespeople to fill one out about each of our customers.

We want to know, based on routine conversation and observation, what our customers are like as human beings. What do they feel strongly about? What are they most proud of having achieved? Any status symbols in their office? In other words, we want to know what turns that person on.

In Muhammad's case it was magic, so I had a local magician teach me a few magic tricks that I could explain and teach to the Champ. We hit it off, and were great friends for the last 20 years. That relationship extended to a tremendous friendship between our wives, Carol Ann and Lonnie.

During a break from that interview, we headed out to lunch. I introduced Muhammad to my driver, Francis. Twenty minutes later, we rolled into a restaurant. As we were getting out of the car, Muhammad whispered to me, "Tell Francis to join us for lunch."

One thing's for sure, when Francis got up in the morning, picked up his work sheet, and read that he was assigned to pick up an envelope salesman from Minnesota for a routine run, he never imagined that he'd be invited by Muhammad Ali to join him for lunch. Muhammad was a master at trying to make everyone feel special.

The Champ also taught me many other lessons that apply to both life and business:

-- Don't be boring or predictable. Entertain your visitors.

-- Be your own self-promoter. Muhammad learned this lesson from pro wrestler Gorgeous George when the two were interviewed on a radio program. A flair for poetry proved helpful!

-- Stand up for your convictions. His faith led him to be a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, for which he was suspended from boxing for more than three years during his prime.

-- Reward your fans, not with a brush-off, like so many athletes today, but by taking genuine pleasure in honoring their requests. When I traveled with him, Muhammad would stop and talk to everyone. He strongly believed in answering his fan mail and sending out autographed photos.

-- Be generous with your time for worthwhile charities. Prime example: The Champ was an unstoppable force behind Celebrity Fight Night, which has raised $123 million to support the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center in Phoenix and many other charities.

-- The world always looks brighter behind a smile. Muhammad always had his 1,000-megawatt smile. He knew smiling was the universal language.

-- Deal with your own physical limitations in good spirits and with optimism, not bitterness and self-pity.

Ali once said: "Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on Earth."

He has paid that rent many times over. Muhammad Ali will always be "The Greatest."

Mackay's Moral: You may not float like a butterfly or sting like a bee, but you would do well to learn from Ali.