Inspirational Living: Life Lessons for Success & Happiness

Listen to episode 489 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Success, Education & The School of Life. Edited and adapted from Youth and Opportunity by Thomas Tapper.

Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: Every task you are called upon to do is not in itself a final act, but an initial act. Every task is suggestive of something higher than itself. Every task and object you contribute to the world is a real thing, something that other people will look at, and by it be more or less influenced.

Now, as every object or task that you contribute to your environment defines you, you should take care that it defines you correctly. The task and the thing are photographs of your mental vision. The more care you take with the negative, the better picture of your intentions you will present to your environment and your times.

The records of the past (and the amazing activities of the present) offer you numberless roads to follow. Whichever highway you elect to travel fixes your direction. You can travel the road both bravely and helpfully; bravely, in that you have faith that it leads you where you must go; helpfully, in that you leave evidence of the work of your mind and hands as you go along, and in that it shall inspire love of work in those who come after, and faith in the direction of the road.

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Listen to episode 488 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Taking Control of Your Mind & Body | Health Podcasts. Edited and adapted from Youth and Opportunity by Thomas Tapper.

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Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: The truth is that you will succeed in life just as you learn to do your work with mind and body as your two great servants. You must be able to say of yourself, as Jean Jacques Rousseau said of his friend Ignacio de Altuna, "His body was well formed for the residence of his mind."

If he want to have a strong body, you must devote your thought to strength. If you want to be rich in material things, you must think and plan and work thoughts of riches. If you want to be of great use in the world, you must direct your thought upon utilitarian activities. Any or all of these conditions will come about if you keep on thinking about them.

It sounds easy, does it not? And yet, most people fail to master mind and body, although success depends on this very mastery. Why do they fail? There are certain things about the mind and body which must be understood early in life if we wish to succeed. In the years of childhood and youth, and before we know just what we want to do in the world, mind and body are full of strength and freshness. We use them with little or no thought. We do not realize that they are our servants, and come to believe: "I am a mind and body. What they do, I am." But, in fact, we should believe, "I have a mind and a body. What I do with them, I am." 

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Listen to episode 487 of the Inspirational Living podcast: How to Overcome Fear | Courageous Living. Edited and adapted from Everyday Efficiency: A Practical Guide to Efficient Living by C.H. Forbes-Lindsay.

Motivational Podcast Excerpt: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast. To support our podcast with a one-time financial donation, please visit LivingHour.org/donate. You kind support will help ensure the continuation of our podcast for years to come. Thank you.

Today’s reading was edited and adapted from Everyday Efficiency: A Practical Guide to Efficient Living by C.H. Forbes-Lindsay, published in 1918.

Fear is the most devastating agency in life. It prevents initiative, paralyzes effort, promotes disease, hampers development and in a thousand ways mars the character. And yet, it is one of the most common defects in character. Most of us are subject to Fear in one form or another. We fear fate, we fear death, we fear disease, we fear poverty, we fear failure, we fear accident, we fear difficulties, we fear responsibility, and on and on.

While writers on the subject agree that Fear often becomes a vice, few offer any practical suggestions for its eradication. The reader is generally advised to use their Reason, which is well enough as far as it goes, but the fact remains that the conclusions of Reason are frequently not sufficient to control action.

Lyman Abbott states that if we look back upon those times in our lives when we thought we were facing danger, we will see in retrospect that the lions were almost ways chained. We know from personal experience that situations which initially excited our fears, were rarely, if ever, as bad as our imagination had pictured them.

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Listen to episode 486 of the Inspirational Living podcast: The 3 Pillars of Success and Happiness. Edited and adapted from Success by Lord Beaverbrook.

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Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: Success — that is the royal road we all want to tread, for it gives us the opportunity to exercise our abilities and activities to the full.  Like all human affairs, success is partly a matter of predestination and partly of free will. You cannot make genius, but you can improve upon it or destroy it, and most people possess the assets which can be turned into success. But those who possess these precious gifts will have to gather and expand them.

What are the qualities which make for success? They are three: Judgment, Industry, and Health, and perhaps the greatest of these is judgment — for in proclaiming the word judgment one has said everything. In the affairs of the world it is the supreme quality.

Surrounding good judgment there cluster many qualities, like the setting around a jewel: such as, the capacity to read the hearts of others; to draw an inexhaustible fountain of wisdom from every particle of experience in the past, and to turn the current of this knowledge into the dynamic action of the future.

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Listen to episode 485 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Cheerfulness & The Wheel of Life. Adapted from Everyday Efficiency by C.H. Forbes-Lindsay.

Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast. To get the best essays from our podcast in heirloom hardcover or digital e-book, please visit InspirationalLifeLessons.com. Today’s reading was edited and adapted from Everyday Efficiency: A Practical Guide to Efficient Living by C.H. Forbes-Lindsay, published in 1918.

Cheerfulness is the lubricant of the "Wheel of Life." It lightens labor, diminishes difficulties, and mitigates misfortunes. After what we may term the essential virtues, Cheerfulness is the most desirable human quality. And it is the most conspicuously absent among Americans. As Emerson once said, "I question if care and doubt ever wrote their names so legibly on the faces of any other population.”

With us the "wheel of life" is allowed to become rusted with worry and clogged with the dust and lint of petty frictions, so that the round of daily life is made doubly difficult and wearing. It IS possible for a cheerless person to achieve success, but they do so at terrible cost to themselves and others. They cannot enjoy money, position, and other attainments, for the power of enjoyment soon passes away from them. They never appreciate the truth that happiness is to be found in living, in endeavor, in the pursuit.

The object striven for seldom brings the anticipated happiness. The person who views life as a painful drudgery to be compensated for by the ultimate realization of a supreme desire has grievous disappointments in store for them — for as Stevenson said: "To travel hopefully is better than to arrive, and true success involves labor. Surely we must look for happiness along the road — not at the end of it.”

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Listen to episode 484 of the Inspirational Living podcast: We are the Master of Ourselves and Fate. Adapted from the book Concentration: The Key to Constructive Thought by C. W. Kyle.

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Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: The axiom, ''As you thinketh in your heart so you are,” is the most startling truth ever uttered about humankind. What an amazing statement it is — for it reveals that we are possessed of the power to create and rule ourselves and our environment by the choice and mastership of our thoughts!

The wonderful fascination of this saying lies in the all-embracing statement which it so directly makes. It covers every possible action we take, and clearly states that we are capable of exercising unlimited powers. Look which way we will, we cannot escape from the finality of this decree.

The beauty of this saying is that it is true, just as it is written. You ARE a world within yourself, and you ARE master of yourself. It matters not how well or ill you may exercise your powers of mastery. You are the unquestioned thinker of your own thoughts, which are the tools of your trade. You are the master craftsman of your own designs, and you build constructively or destructively as you will. You make yourself sick or well, rich or poor, strong or feeble, sorrowful or joyous by the character of the thoughts you think.

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Listen to episode 482 of the Inspirational Living podcast: The Wealth & Greatness Within You | Living Your Ideals. Edited and adapted from Levels of Living by Henry Frederick Cope.

Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast. If you enjoy our podcast, you can help us out by leaving a positive review at the iTunes store. Thank you. Today’s reading was edited and adapted from Levels of Living (Essays on Everyday Ideals) by Henry Frederick Cope, published in 1908.

There is an old mystical saying that the things which are not seen are essential to all success. We are blind if we can see only with our eyes, and we only are sensible when we know that there are many things beyond our senses. Practical people consider all the factors to every problem, and things are not less real to them because they might be intangible.

The unseen things are imminent to us always. There are many things not yet pigeonholed by our science nor catalogued by our philosophies. You can dissect a daisy and enumerate its parts; but you never know a daisy until you have seen the unseen things thereof, until you have felt the subtle appeal of its beauty.

The danger is that in our hard workaday lives we shall forget the reality of the unseen; we shall get to thinking that gold, steel, land, and money are the only real things. How easy it is to measure everyone by their possessions of tangible things. How easy to make these our chief end in life — to slight the real prizes (the unseen wealth that lies so close at hand or already possessed), while we rush and strive for the rainbow of riches.

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Listen to episode 481 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Courage, Self-Mastery & Rising Above Our Failures. Edited and adapted from Ready Money by George H. Knox.

Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: Success is largely a matter of management. Self-mastery means more than doing right morally and controlling one's temper. You, indeed, must have something of a temper if you are going to be good for anything. Without a temper a person is like a piece of untempered steel. But while it’s necessary to have a temper, it is also necessary to control it, at least most of the time — all the time would be asking too much.

It is said that the person who can control their temper can control others and have things their own way. But sometimes our inclinations are harder to control than our temper. It is understood that we should control our thoughts and actions so far as not doing certain things is concerned, but it is doing things that we don’t like to do, or when we don’t like to do them, that is the real test — for there is such a thing as impulse, moods, and the blues that we must contend with.

It is said that a horse is a creature of impulse. If it wants grass it eats grass; if it wants to lie down it lies down. We are sometimes also a creature of impulse to a certain extent. When we feel like quitting, we too often quit, whether we are through or not. When we don’t like the work, we quit for the same reason. And when we get the blues; we quit simply because we are blue.

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Listen to episode 480 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Finding Yourself | Living Up to Your Potential. Edited and adapted from Ready Money by George H. Knox.

Motivational Podcast Excerpt: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast. A special thanks to our newest patrons: Lucy Burns and Afya Gabriel. I truly appreciate your financial support. Thank you. Today’s reading was edited and adapted from Ready Money by George H. Knox, published in 1905.

There's not very much difference between the person who is succeeding and the other who isn't; between the person who is taking big strides onward, and the other who is doing only fairly well. One has discovered themselves; and the other has not. One knows they can do things; and the other is not sure.

We are more capable than we think we are. We don’t expect as much of ourselves as we should. We too frequently judge ourselves by what we are, instead of what we may become by adding just a little more energy and thought to our efforts.

The rate at which your capacity for doing things can be developed is wonderful. You can do but a little today, but by doing that little (and doing it with snap and energy), you are a stronger person tomorrow. You can do more. And the next day a new idea is evolved in your mind. You begin to think. And thinking is what makes the woman and man — not thinking alone, but thinking and putting those thoughts into action.

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Listen to episode 479 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Getting Started Right Each and Every Day. Edited and adapted from Byways of Blessedness by James Allen.

Motivational Podcast Excerpt: Life is full of beginnings. They are presented every day and every hour to every person. Most beginnings are small, and appear trivial and insignificant, but in reality they are the most important things in life.

See how in Nature everything proceeds from small beginnings. The mightiest river is at first a rivulet over which the grasshopper could leap; the great flood commences with a few drops of rain; the sturdy oak, which has endured the storms of a thousand winters, was once an acorn; and the smoldering match, carelessly dropped, may be the means of devastating a whole town by fire.

Have you yet discovered the vast importance of beginnings? Do you really know what is involved in a beginning? Do you know the number of beginnings you are continuously making, and realize their full importance? If not, come with me for a short time, and thoughtfully explore this much ignored pathway to success and a life well lived.

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