What could be nearer to us than our own selves. What could be a greater fortune to discover than our own love. When you can accept yourself just as you are, with all your warts and wrinkles, with all those extra tucks of fat, with all those scars and blemishes, with all your broken promises and misadventures, then, and only then, can you begin to appreciate your own power, beauty, integrity, intelligence, and competence. The first fortune found within is unconditional self-love. Personal power comes from learning to respect and listen to your own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. How much do you think youre worth? Dale Carnegie observes that we possess incredible riches, riches exceeding by far the fabled treasures of Ali Baba. He asks, Would you sell both your eyes for a billion dollars? What would you take for your legs? Your hands? Your hearing? Add up your assets, and you will find that you wont sell what you have for all the gold ever amassed by the Rockerfellers, the Fords, and the Morgans combined. Schopenhauer once said: We seldom think of what we have but always what we lack. The second fortune found within is time. Do you squander precious hours of your day just fumbling and, loitering? Yet this is your vital life-force ebbing away. Respect your time. Organize it. Make the time of your life count for something. What are your values and how much of your time are you spending to fulfill those values? Draw up daily notes of what you do with your day. Organize the time of your life. The simple idea of planning your day the night before will open up hours of creative, value-affirming time. The third fortune found within is purpose. Where are you going in your life? Do you have a direction? Is this the right direction? Are you in the right place to fulfill your inner yearnings? Perhaps you could be in the wrong place and doing the wrong things. Perhaps youre a mathematician working as an accountant, or a writer working as a computer technician, or an artist trying to climb the corporate ladder. While financial necessity may force you to stay in a position which does not match your talents, you should commit your free time to developing your skills so that a time comes when they are marketable and can open up a way to live your dream job. If you continue to do what youre doing will it lead to the life you really want? Purpose makes life worth living. Once, in Biloxi, Mississippi, a news report told the story of a 24-year-old dancer who tired to commit suicide by jumping from a wharf. A young man dived in after her, hoping to save her life, but quickly remembered that he couldnt swim. He would have drowned had the young woman not rescued him. Thus, saving his life gave her the will to live. The fourth fortune found within is learn from your mistakes. Mistakes are the building blocks to success. The more mistakes you make, the more you realize how not to do something. Mistakes guide you to the right direction. Basically, you have to fail your way to success. Failure, observed the English poet, John Keats, is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully avoid. And the fifth fortune found within is to nourish dreams. Give things a chance to happen! admonishes Richard DeVos. Give success a chance to happen! It is impossible to win the race unless you venture to run, impossible to win the victory unless you dare to battle. No life is more tragic than that of the individual who nurses a dream, an ambition, always wishing and hoping, but never giving it a chance to happen. He nurses the flickering dream, but never lets it break into flame.... There are millions...the schoolteacher who wants to go back for that masters degree; the small businessman who dreams of expanding his business; the couple who has intended to make that trip to Europe; the housewife whose ambition is to write short stories for the fiction market. The list could go on and on. People dreaming but never daring, never willing to say, I can, never trusting their dreams to the real world of action and effort. People, in short, who are so afraid of failure that they fail. |
