The 5 Fortunes Within
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 you're 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 won't 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 you're 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 you're 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 couldn't 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
master's 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."