How to Master the Basic Fundamentals of Life by Earl Nightingale
All of us want two unique ambitious goals
Within all of us burns two unquenchable ambitions to serve importantly and to gain financial independence.
Our reward psychic and tangible will be in proportion to our service. The failure most people to live successfully is not caused by their lack of abilities, far from it but rather in their failure to decide what is it that they want. and understanding that our wants are governed by our talents and abilities.
Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. That is anyone who knows where he is going in life is a success.
At the moment he makes the decision of what it is he intends to accomplish, of what it is he considers a worthy ideal. He is successful.
We are what we think about.
To my mind, the story of a person’s life is the story of a quest, a search to which he devotes his life. We know that the happiest people of earth are those who know exactly what it is they seek and set boldly out to find it.
And while we’re all dreamers, the fortunate ones are those who found a dream so exciting and worthwhile that they will devote a part or all their lives to make that dream come true. But while our dream by far the great majority, that 95% never realizes that a persistent daydream is often the point on which we should set our compass, the place toward which it is meant for us to journey.
The tragedy is that the great majority shrugs off this built-in direction finder and returns to the wide, visible well-marked road in life which they feel must be the best road because it carries the heaviest traffic. The road in life with the heaviest traffic is not the best road to follow, for it is the road of the 95%. It is the road with no more opportunity and with 19 times as much competition.
Most people don’t have the answers, they are discouraged and confused in a world which should have been filled with challenge and excitement.
It is true we were in the era of the great depression, But to a thinking individual, this represents another problem to be solved another challenge to overcome and to many, it was the thing that sparked their greatest accomplishment.
Discouragement comes from two places, one a lack of control and two a situation over which we can exercise no control. Most people are discouraged because they lacked information. They don’t know the rules of this game called life, and they have been checkmated without remorse. They didn’t realize that without a goal and aiming point we are without purpose and direction, they clung together feeling somehow that there was safety in numbers without realizing that in this case, just the opposite is true. If we conform to the big group, the odds are 95 to 5 that we’ll miss the boat in life in almost every vital and important aspect of living. To prove this you only need to take a look at human history. Of all the billions of human beings who have lived on earth, all great advances, all great ideas have come from just a handful, a few thousand out of billions.
Now, how have the people as a group, reacted to the great ideas? Every great leader and thinker from Socrates to the Wright brothers has been scorned, ridiculed, poisoned, imprisoned, stoned, pilloried, burned at the stake or crucified. Mankind as a group has a consistently grisly game of tormenting his saviors. Why? Lack of information. Lack of knowledge. It comes from following the wrong crowd.
What can we learn from all this as an individual? Two things.
1. To amount to anything as individuals we’ve got to be individuals. We’ve got to have individual goals, Individual thinking, and individual action. and 2. We must never conform to the great mass of people. We must love them, and help them for our joy and success will be determined by the extent to which we serve them. But we must never lose our individuality and identity by permitting ourselves to be submerged in this suffocating sea of indirection and purposelessness.
There is nothing wrong with emulation, in fact, it’s a good idea. So long as we emulate a person who represents that we wish to become but never the crowd, never the 95%.