Inspirational Living: Life Lessons for Success & Happiness

Listen to episode 566 of the Inspirational Living Podcast: The Most Valuable Secret of Life. Edited an adapted from the work of Elbert Hubbard, collected in the book The American Bible by Alice Hubbard.

Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: The secret, which I am about to tell you, is the most valuable and far-reaching of any known to human kind. It is the key to health, happiness, wealth, power, success. It is the open sesame to Paradise, here and now. A secret is something known only to a few. But often the best way to retain a secret is to let others help you to keep it. Just as the only way to retain love is to give it away — art and religion the same.

This secret, which I am about to impart, will cause no thrill, save in the hearts of those who already know it. And all I can do for you, anyway, is to tell you the things you know, but which possibly you do not know you know until I tell you.

So, here, then, is the secret.....

Listen to episode 565 of the Inspirational Living Podcast: Mastering Your Moods | The Art of Arts. Edited and adapted from Every Man a King by Orison Swett Marden.

Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: When things get hard for you, when everything seems to go against you, when you are thwarted on every side, when the sky is dark and you can see no light, that is just the time to exhibit your mettle, to show of what stuff you are made. If there is anything in you, adversity will bring it out. What you do in spite of circumstances, rather than because of them, is the measure of your success ability.

When you get up in the morning feeling blue and discouraged because disagreeable things confront you, make up your mind firmly that, come what may, you will make that particular day a "red-letter" day in your life. Then, instead of a probable failure and the loss of a day, you will at least accomplish infinitely more than you would have done if you had given way to your depressing mood.

Listen to episode 562 of the Inspirational Living Podcast: Building the Habits to Set You Free. Edited and adapted from King of Mind, Body, and Circumstance by James Allen.

Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: Habit is repetition. We repeat the same thoughts, the same actions, the same experiences over and over again until they are incorporated within our being, until they are built into our character as part of ourselves. Faculty is fixed habit. Evolution is mental accumulation. Humanity, today, is the result of millions of repetitious thoughts and acts. We are not ready-made. We become, and are still becoming. Our character is predetermined by our own choice. The thought, the act, which we choose — that, by habit, we become.

Thus each person is an accumulation of thoughts and deeds. The characteristics which you manifest instinctively and without effort are lines of thought and action that become, by long repetition, automatic — for it is the nature of habit to become unconscious, to repeat itself without any apparent choice or effort on the part of its possessor. And in due time it takes such complete possession of the individual as to appear to render their will powerless to counteract it. This is the case with all habits, whether good or bad.

Listen to episode 556 of the Inspirational Living Podcast: Bringing Out the Best Within You. Edited and adapted from Mastery of Fate by Christian D. Larson.

Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: To bring out the best that is within you, you must not merely exist; you must live. When you actually live, you are what you are, and are ALL that you are. You stop trying to be something else, or someone else. You do not imitate, but continue to be yourself always. And this is one of the secrets in the creation of a greater destiny.

Listen to episode 554 of the Inspirational Living Podcast: How the Mind Works | Law of Attraction. Edited and adapted from How the Mind Works by Christian D. Larson.

Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: Through the law of attraction, we naturally meet in the external world what corresponds to our own internal world, that is, to what we are in ourselves. The self constitutes the magnet, and like attracts like. This inner self that constitutes the magnet is composed of all the active forces, desires, tendencies, motives, states, and thoughts that are at work in your mind or personality.

When you look at everything that is alive throughout your whole being (and put all those things together) you have what may be termed your present active self. And this self invariably attracts in the external world such conditions as correspond to its own nature.

This self (and all its parts within you) correspond to the thoughts that you have been creating in your mind. In fact, the nature of the self is actually composed of your thoughts, mental states, and mental activities. Therefore, when you change your thoughts, the nature of your inner self will change, and this change will be good or otherwise depending upon your changes of thought.

Listen to episode 552 of the Inspirational Living Podcast: The Greatest Power Within You. Edited and adapted from How the Mind Works by Christian D. Larson.

Self-Help Podcast Excerpt: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast. I have some exciting news about a beautiful, new short film that is going to feature audio from this podcast. The film is an irreverent story about a homeless man who stumbles upon an eccentric self-help program that guides him on his odyssey to become a fisherman. In addition to providing inspirational audio to the filmmakers, I am also one of the film’s producers.

To learn more about this film project and our Kickstarter campaign, visit LivingHour.org/film. Thank you.

Today’s reading was edited and adapted from How the Mind Works by Christian D. Larson, published in 1912.

The powers and possibilities that are inherent in the human mind are practically unbounded — for virtually no limit can be found to anything in human nature. The discovery that everything in human nature contains a latent capacity for perpetual development should give us a new conception of ourselves, a conception which when applied will revolutionize the entire sphere of our thought and action.

Listen to episode 551 of the Inspirational Living Podcast: Training Your Mind for Complete Success. Edited and adapted from Personal Power by Keith J. Thomas.

Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: If you want to make yourself great, it is worth a little trouble, and the habit of doing things in the best possible manner will make you do everything you undertake in the same spirit of thorough perfection. The same divine, creative spirit dwells in you that dwelt in Michelangelo, in Catherine the Great, in Plato and St. Paul. The only power that differentiated them from others and made them heroic figures shining brightly in the firmament of life was the power of mind. That same power will raise you above others, above your competitors in business, above the disabilities of your environment — that power and no other.

If you are to raise yourself intellectually the stimulus must come from yourself. You must make a point of training your mental faculties all day and every day, till you know what a vast power you have within you and how to use it.

Listen to episode 548 of the Inspirational Living Podcast: Overcoming Your Doubts & Fears | Motivational Podcasts. Edited and adapted from Personal Power by Keith J. Thomas.

Motivational Podcast Excerpt: “For the timid and hesitating, everything is impossible, because it seems so," says Sir Walter Scott. The converse is expressed in the English proverb, "Nothing is impossible to a willing mind.”

The limit of our achievements is the power of our own thought. The mind grows on what it feeds upon. If you allow doubt to occupy any place at all in your mind, that doubt will grow there. A little hesitation will grow into a big doubt, and the habit of doubt will surely result in death to self-reliance, and good-bye to success.

Out with all your doubts and fears! They are unworthy of your mind, which should be in harmony with the Infinite. No task can ever come your way that you have not the power within you to fulfill....

Listen to episode 545 of the Inspirational Living Podcast: Living Up to Every Day’s Possibilities. Edited and adapted from The Power of Truth by William George Jordan.

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Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: If we would make our lives worthy of us, grand and noble, solid and impregnable, we must forsake air-castles of dreaming for strongholds of doing. Every person with an ideal has a right to live in the glow and inspiration of it, and to picture the joy of attainment, but the worker should never really worry about the future, think little of it except for inspiration. You should determine your course, as mariners study the stars; then make your plans wisely and prepare for that future by making each separate day the best and truest that you can.

Live up to the fullness of your possibilities each day. You have only one day of life — today. You did live yesterday, you may live tomorrow, but you have only today.

Listen to episode 544 of the Inspirational Living Podcast: The Nature & Power of the Mind. Edited and adapted from Out From the Heart by James Allen.

Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: Your life proceeds from your heart and mind. You have compounded that mind by your own thoughts and deeds. It is within your power to refashion that mind by your choice of thought. And in this manner, you can transform your life.

To begin, remember that every established mental condition is an acquired habit, and it has become so by continuous repetition of thought. Despondency and cheerfulness, anger and calmness, covetousness and generosity — indeed, all states of mind — are habits built up by choice, until they have become automatic. A thought constantly repeated, at last becomes a fixed habit of mind, and from such habits proceeds one’s life.