Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy

Welcome to Day 265 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.

This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom

7 Insights for Developing Your Personal Philosophy

Thank you for joining us for our 7 days a week, 7 minutes of wisdom podcast. This is Day 265 of our trek, and yesterday we discovered the 18 signposts for strong personal leadership. Today we will extend our trail and look for 7 more signposts to develop our personal philosophy of life. If you miss any of our Wisdom-Trek episodes, please go to Wisdom-Trek.com to listen to them and read the daily journal.

We are recording our podcast from our studio at Home2 in Charlotte, North Carolina. On the day this episode is released we will be back in Ohio at The Big House. There is an extensive amount of renovation work that needs to be accomplished in the weeks that we spend in Marietta as we prepare for our Chamberlain reunion scheduled for July 4th weekend. We won’t be nearly finished in the entire house by then, but we have made significant progress in the past 5 years. We are anticipating between 75-100 people in attendance during that weekend.

As you can tell our personal philosophy about family is that it is very important to us. We desire to preserve the heritage that has been entrusted to us. We realize that few individuals in today's fragmented and fast-paced society have this privilege. Just as we are aware of this, on the trails that we will hike today, we will look for additional signposts to discover…

7 Insights for Developing Your Personal Philosophy

Your philosophy is the greatest determining factor in how your life works out. This is how to build a meaningful one.

While there are many puzzle pieces for success, without developing a sound philosophy, the other pieces are of little value. So as you go forward on this journey toward success, remember to:

1. Set your sail.

The winds of circumstance blow upon all of us. We all have experienced the winds of disappointment, despair, and heartbreak, but why do people arrive at such different places at the end of the journey? Have we not all sailed upon the same sea?

The major difference isn’t circumstance. It’s the set of your sail (or the way you think). It’s what you do after you have set your sails and the wind decides to change direction. When the winds change, you must change. You have to struggle to your feet and reset the sail in a manner that will steer you in the direction of your own deliberate choice. The set of your sail, or how you think and how you respond, has a far greater capacity to destroy your life than any challenges you face. How quickly you respond to adversity is far more important than adversity itself.

The great challenge of life is to control the process of your own thinking.

2. Learn from success and failure.

The best way to establish a new and powerful personal philosophy is to objectively review the conclusions you’ve drawn about life. Any conclusion you’ve drawn that isn’t working for you could be working against you. The best way to counteract misinformation and wrong data is to input new and accurate information. Gather information from personal experience. If you’re doing something wrong, evaluate what you did wrong and change things.

Seek an objective, outside voice about how you are and what you’re doing. An objective opinion from someone you respect can lead you to early and accurate information about your decision-making process. Listen to the freshness of an outside voice—someone who can see the forest and isn’t lost in the trees.

Observe the successes and failures of other people. If people who failed were to give seminars, it would be helpful. You could see how people mess up and you wouldn’t do what they did.