Have you ever noticed that the longer you look at something you should be doing, the more difficult it seems to appear? That the longer you put off something you should do, the more difficult it is to get started? A good deal of frustration and unhappiness could be avoided if people would just do [...]

Here are some interesting questions you might want to try answering. One: If you could completely change places with any other person in the world, would you do it? And who would that person be? Two: If you could work at any job you could choose, would that work be different from the work you’re [...]

I read a great Greek poem by Cifi Cavafy titled “Ithaka,” and in it were reminded that it is the voyage and the adventures on the way that count, not the arrival itself. Old Cervantes said the same thing. This seems to be a most difficult truth to understand. This is not to say that [...]

When a child is born, he or she comes equipped with certain basic drives that psychologists have been listing for us for many years. And to my mind, one of the most interesting of these basic drives is the one we might call the drive to go on the virtually indestructible tendency on the part of [...]

A clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Cornell University, Ari Kiev MD writes: “In my practice as a psychiatrist, I have found that helping people to develop personal goals, has proved to be the most effective way to help them to cope with problems. Observing the lives of people who have mastered adversity, I have [...]

Mary Pickford used to say, “Don’t look at the sudden loss of a habit, or a way of life, as the end of the road; see it instead as only a bend in the road that will open up all sorts of interesting possibilities and new experiences. After all, you’ve seen the scenery on the [...]

Many years ago, I discovered Professor William James wonderful little book On Vital Reserves. In it, he says that everyone knows what it is to start a piece of work, either intellectual or physical, feeling stale. And everyone knows what it is to warm up to his work. The process of warming up is particularly [...]

Dorothy Van Doren, in “Words to Live By”, chose some words of Saint Francis of Assisi. She chose the words “I would finish hoeing my garden.” These words were Saint Francis answer, when someone asked me why are working in his garden, what he would do if he were suddenly to learn that he would [...]

If you’re going to be a big success as a human being, you have to fit into one of two groups or belong to both of them, it seems to me. So let’s talk about these two groups of very successful men and women. The first group belongs to what I call the river. These [...]

Will power has been called persistence. It’s the knack of staying with something. The sustained effort necessary to induce absolute faith. Persistence is an essential factor in the procedure of transmuting the thoughts of what you’d like to have into their reality. Now the basis of persistence is the power of will. Willpower and desire [...]