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Thursday Throwback: Take a Chance

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Walt Disney Quote About Failure

Sometimes I wonder if “common sense” isn’t another way of saying “fear.” And “fear” too often spells failure. – Walt Disney

Take a Chance by Walt Disney

In the lexicon of youth… there is no such word as fail! – Edward Bulwer-Lytton

I wonder how many times these sturdy old words have been used in graduation speeches each year.  Tehy take me back to my own high-school days, when I had my first pair of white flannel trousers and the world ahead held no  heartbreak or fear.

Certainly we have all had this confidence at one time in our lives, though most of us lose it as we grow older.  Perhaps, because of my work, I’ve been lucky enough to retain a shred of this youthful quality.  But sometimes, as I look back on how tough things were, I wonder if I’d go through it again.  I hope I would.

When I was about twenty-one, I went broke for the first time.  I slept on chair cushions in my “studio” in Kansas City and ate cold beans out of a can.  But I took another look at my dream and set out for Hollywood.

Foolish? Not to a youngster.  An older person might have had too much “common sense” to do it.  Sometimes I wonder if “common sense” isn’t another way of saying “fear.” And “fear” too often spells failure.

In the lexicon of youth there is no such word as “fail.”  Remember the story about the boy who wanted to march in the circus parade?  When the show came to town, the bandmaster needed a trombonist, so the boy signed up.  He hadn’t marched a block before the fearful noises from his horn caused two old ladies to faint and a horse to run away.  The bandmaster demanded, “Why didn’t you tell me you couldn’t play the trombone?” And the boy said, “How did I know? I never tried before!”

Many years ago, I might have done just what that boy did.  Now I”m a grandfather and have a good many gray hairs and what a lot of people would call common sense.  But if I’m not longer young in age, I hope I stay young enough in spirit never to fear failure – young enough still to take a chance and march in the parade.  – Walt Disney

Thursday Throwback: I Say What I Think!

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Autumn Trees

Occasionally on Thursdays, I post “Throwback” self help articles or book snippets from yesterday’s authors who I feel still have a lot to say. Some of the best self help, motivational, and inspirational books and articles were written before many of us were even born.The following article, written by stage and screen star Lilli Palmer, appeared in the book Words to Live By (1947). The title of the article is I Say What I Think and I’ve typed it in exactly as it appeared in the book.

My mother was born on the river Rhine, where people are gay and easygoing, where they drink much wine and don’t care who likes them. When I was a child I often heard from her a healthy warning, especially when I came crying that someone didn’t like me and demanding to know what I could do to make him or her like me.

“Everybody’s friend is everybody’s fool,” she would say serenely; or sometimes, “Many enemies mean much honor,” or “Where there’s much sun there’s much shadow.”

I have interpreted those ideas in my own way. I don’t set out to antagonize people, or to be aggressive or provocative, but I have never made a special concession just for the purpose of being liked. I’ve spoken my mind even when I knew that what I said might be unpopular, because I believe that to speak your mind is essential, to take part in a controversy is important. It has never been my nature to sit back and keep quiet for fear of treading on somebody’s toes.

The danger of being too sensitive to what others think is strongly illustrated in the play Death of a Salesman. The author makes an important cause of the demoralization of his hero the fact that he cared too much whether he was well liked. He was afraid ever to make an enemy, and this hastened his destruction.

My mother made me immune to that fear in early youth. You can’t go through life only making friends, I realized very soon.

If, for a good cause, you must make an enemy, accept the fact. As long as your conscience is clear, you will find that you have strengthened not only your determination but your character. – Lilli Palmer

Powerful Self Help Lesson 1923

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It’s been a while since I’ve had a “Thursday Throwback” post on the blog. It’s not that I’ve lost my fascination with “older” books, not by a long stretch! I’ve simply been very (make that VERY) busy with current books that I’m reading for pleasure, information, and to review on this blog as well as my food blog.

Every now and again, however, I feel the need to cuddle up on my couch with a slightly chubby and extremely spoiled cat, a cup of coffee, and an author from the distant past.  F.D. Van Amburgh, Elsie Lincoln Benedict, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Orison Swett Marden, and Grenville Kleiser are a few of my absolute favorites.

Last night was a busy night for me.  I mean, I had so much to do!  I had to walk with two of my daughters, watch Survivor, and then play a baseball game. Actually, I watched as the St. Louis Cardinals played, but with all of my gyrations, umpiring, and coaching, I feel like I’m playing. In the middle of all of it, I asked Elsie Lincoln Benedict if she’d like to sit on the couch with me. She’s wild about Albert Pujols, so she was game. She understood that our visits would be limited to commercials, but that was fine with her.  She’s all about number 5.

The following is an excerpt from Elsie Lincoln Benedict’s excellent series of books aptly titled “How to Get Anything You Want.”  This excerpt is from Lesson 1 and, as you’ll see, it’s the perfect place to begin. I’m typing this in just as it is in the text, which is from 1923, so the wording will be a little different from what you’re accustomed to, unless of course (like me) you also read a lot of older books.  In no time at all, you won’t even notice the different ways of wording things. You’ll only notice the brilliance of the author.  I’m typing in the words  exactly as they appear in the original book – where the author has written certain thoughts in ALL CAPS, I’m doing the same.

I figure if she wants to yell these particular words, I’ll hand her the megaphone.

How Your Predominant Moods Make Your Life
by Elsie Lincoln Benedict, 1923

A man on a country road stopped another and said, “If I keep walking in this direction, how far will I have to go to reach Chicago?”

If you keep going in the direction you are headed now it will be about twenty-five thousand miles,” the other answered, “but if you will turn around and go in the opposite direction it is about a mile and a half.”

If you, dear friend, have been wondering why you did not reach the place in life or acquire the things you desired, perhaps you have been expending your energies in exactly the opposite direction from what you should.

If you have been getting some of the things you wanted but failed at others you have been headed right on some and wrong on others.

Now there are certain things inside every one of us that keep turning us, like  a weather vane, in certain directions, and those things are our predominant moods.

You cannot entertain a certain mood and not act upon it sooner or later, any more than a man walking straight toward a thing could fail to reach it ultimately.  The moods that PREDOMINATE deep, deep inside our hearts are living, vital forces, and they create actualities in our lives which exactly correspond to their own nature.

What happens down through the years, in the by and large of a man’s life, fits these predominant moods of his just as if they were coats made to order.

For that is what the outer conditions of our lives really are – garments made by ourselves when we least suspected it, in exact accordance with the pattern we carried in our subconscious minds….

….. The very first thing for you to know as we start out on this journey is that our lives are not just a series of accidental happenings, as we have supposed, but are the OUTER CIRCUMSTANCES built directly or indirectly, innocently, usually unknowingly but nevertheless inevitably, by groups of INNER FEELINGS.

These INNER FEELINGS constitute our moods. The “feeling” (not the thought) you have about any given thing or person is your predominant attitude toward that person or thing.

This is especially true of those feelings you cannot explain – that don’t seem to be based in reason or fact or anything you can lay your hand on, but which just ARE. These prepare the soil in the garden of your subconscious.

Each and every seed brings forth something sooner or later, and that something is always of the nature of the seed.

A tomato seed cannot bring forth an American Beauty rose.  But if you plant rose seeds year in and year out, no matter how poor the soil, you are going to harvest roses sometime.

The acts of every person spring from the secret seeds which he has planted or allowed to be planted in his subconscious mind.

A man’s acts bring the results you see in his life, but the act, in every case, was rooted in a thought or feeling which he could have controlled had he known how…..

…. You will get a better idea of just how these moods build the realities of your life if you will think of yourself as owning a very powerful cannon.  This is your own subconscious mind.

Now this cannon is different from any you ever saw in real life, in that it is constructed on the boomerang principle. Every shot fired from this queer piece of artillery comes back to you, AND IT DOESN’T COME BACK ALONE.

It returns to your feet LADEN WITH RESULTS, REALITIES, ACTUAL OCCURRENCES.

Whether these actualities are helpful or harmful, destructive or constructive, what you desire or what you despise, depends entirely on THE DIRECTION IN WHICH YOU KEEP YOUR CANNON POINTED MOST OF THE TIME.

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Elsie Lincoln Benedict certainly doesn’t need my $3 words trailing her million dollar thoughts, so I’ll be brief (perhaps for the first time in my life).  The “take away” lesson from this would be: Always pay close attention to your thoughts and even closer attention to the ones you put on repeat.   If we think of our thoughts as the ammunition in our cannon, how foolish we’d be to not choose wisely.

 

How to Keep Your Resolutions

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Quote About Keeping Resolutions

I love Thursday Throwback posts on the Self Help Blog.  As a book lover, I get a special thrill out of reaching back into the distant past and retrieving a piece of brilliance left for us.  When they wrote these wonderful words, the authors, no doubt, hoped that the words would reach as many people as possible.  That’s why I LOVE to see others doing their best to keep old books that are in the public domain alive and well.   Riches untold lie in the books that are lying around in attics and musky used book stores.  The authors would want their words dusted off, revived, and put in front of a whole new generation.

Whenever I type in one of these articles or excerpts from great authors of the past, I always imagine them walking the earth today. I try to imagine what they’d make of our dress, the way we talk, our hairstyles, and cars!  Can you imagine what’d they’d think of today’s cars?  I’m obsessed with the idea of bringing these great men and women back to teach and inspire us, because they have so much to teach us. Even if their words and expressions are different from our own, their knowledge is priceless.

It’s a special joy for me to share excerpts from my personal favorite  authors like Grenville Kleiser.  The following article appeared in one of Kleiser’s books (from 1917), Inspiration and Ideals.  As always with Thursday Throwbacks, I’ll remind you that I”m typing the words in just as they are written in the book in 1917.

Put Your Ideas Into Practice

by Grenville Kleiser

Make more positive resolutions regarding the things you ought to do. Bring every available reinforcement to bear upon such resolutions.  Write down on a card the special things you resolve to do, and read it several times a day.  Repeat it aloud at frequent intervals.  Assert in vigorous tones of voice the thoughts you wish to establish as unconscious habits of your life.  The best means of impressing new resolutions upon your mind is by concentration, iteration, and vigorous assertion.

At the close of every day review your thoughts and actions, and know precisely what you have done with your new resolutions. It is a great thing to conceive a great idea, but it is still greater to put it into execution.

– From Inspiration and Ideals by Grenville Kleiser, 1917

It’s funny, isn’t it. When we think of the word RESOLUTIONS, we think of New Year’s Day.  Yet, resolutions are simply things we’ve resolved to do or keep from doing. We can (and certainly should) make resolutions all year – not just at the first.  If we, as Kleiser suggests, wrote these resolutions down on index cards and confronted them several times a day (as opposed to writing them down at the fist of the year, and never looking at them again!), we’d stand a much better chance of turning them from resolutions into reality.

Resolutions, or goals, should be made often and confronted daily.  The Grenville article above was plucked from a book in which he gave advice and motivation for each day of the year – much like devotions.  This particular one actually fell on the date March 7 – far removed from New Year’s Day.  Just a reminder that we need to think about self improvement and growth every day of the year, not just the first one.

“The best means of impressing new resolutions upon your mind is by concentration, iteration, and vigorous assertion.” – Grenville Kleiser

 

How to Achieve Greatness and Inspire it in Others

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I’ve been reading from an issue of NAUTILUS: Magazine of Thought from the 1920s.  I’m not trying to be vague about the date, but rips on the front cover leave me with limited knowledge.  The issue is from either September, October, November, or December (as only a -BER) remains.  The BER is followed by 192 and another rip.

Like all of the NAUTILUS Magazines of Thought, BER 192 is exceptional.

One article in particular stands out to me, “The Desire to Be Great.”  It was written by William E. Towne and he has tickled my brain cells – lo these many years after the fact.

The desire to be great is one of the four great primal desires that drive the human being to action and keep him living and working.

Unless this desire is fed in some way, unless there is some form of self-expression that will give it free play, the individual will get out of tune with life and drift toward sickness, failure, or crime.

In the last analysis all motives are personal.  Trace any seemingly impersonal motive back to its origin and you will find it has a personal basis.  And prominent in the motives of the individual is the desire to better his condition, to grow in power and greatness.

If the hope of advancement is discouraged and repressed, effort drops to a low level.  The individual then takes the easiest way in every crisis. He grows outwardly indifferent. –  William E. Towne

In the article, Towne points out how strong our desire to be great is.  He also suggests that this primal desire is behind many (if not all) of our actions, thoughts, and words.  He makes a case for this desire being behind criminals’ deeds but, personally, I don’t think I’m 100 percent behind him on this one.  I think greed, laziness, selfishness, and an overall lack of respect for anyone or anything is behind criminal intents.

Having said that, I do completely believe, as Towne does, that this desire to be great is with us even in childhood.  I also believe this intense desire follows us every day of our lives.

When a child shows specially mischievous tendencies the cause may quite often lie in his lack of adequate self-expression for this desire to be great.  The remedy is to give him an opportunity to excel in something for which he has a special aptitude.  His education should be flexible enough to make allowance for this, even if it be necessary to depart from established customs and methods of procedure. – William E. Towne

Outstanding!  I’ve always felt that, generally, many children act out simply because they want attention – they want to be seen, heard, and acknowledged.  If we help them channel this desire positively – in a way that’s best for them and everyone around them – everyone’s a winner.  Most importantly, the child.

My husband and I had our daughters very close together.  The oldest two (Emily and Brittany) were born 13 months apart and there were only 27 months between Brittany and Stephany.  Even though I was a very young mother without ANY experience with children, I realized that each little girl should be encouraged to be an individual and that we should all encourage them to pursue their interests and establish their own glorious identities.

I’ve always made sure to greatly encourage and embrace each one’s special talents and interests.  Emily has always been very literary-minded.  She was reading classics before most adults even knew who the Bronte sisters were.  Needless to say, we were frequent visitors to bookstores and libraries.   Emily also expressed herself, from an early age, through writing – which I also encouraged highly.

Brittany is, and has always been, extremely artistic.  I promise you, the girl can draw anything.  Again, we always surrounded her with paint, sketching pads, pencils, art kits, and everything else you could think of.  She’s enrolled in an art class now and continues to blow me away with her artistic talent.   I’ve always told her that one of these days I’m going to write a cookbook and I want her to illustrate it.

Better yet, maybe Emily can write a children’s book and Brittany can be the illustrator.

As for the baby of the family, Stephany is a whiz with graphic art and web design.  When Em and Britt get that children’s book created, Steph can make a website for it that’ll blow everyone away!  When Stephany was just 13, she was building websites from the ground up.

My husband has always bought her every book conceivable on web design and graphic art. I was sorting through some of these books the other day, looking for something in particular and it occurred to me that the collective cost of all of these books could have bought a houseful of computers!

Oh well, like they say – if you think an education is expensive, try not having one.

Here are just a few of Stephany’s latest creations in graphic art.  She made the banners on each of these sites:

Hollywood Yesterday

Keira Knightley Fansite

Zac Efron Fansite

When you feed a child’s desire to be great, they come to believe in themselves so strongly that no one can convince them otherwise.  By contrast, if you doubt a child, they’ll doubt themselves as well.  When you discourage them, you do more harm than you possibly realize.

I use these banners designed by Steph simply to illustrate (excuse the pun) that encouragement to be great can lead to remarkable (and beautiful) things.

When I taught Sunday School years ago, I had a little boy in my class that was as much trouble as he was cute. Lots of cuteness – lots of trouble.  It didn’t take long to realize that he simply craved attention – even if that attention was reprimands and astonished looks from the other children.  EVEN if that attention involved telling his parents that their adorable little boy was a perfect little nightmare.

I decided to approach it from another direction.  I made him my special little helper.  He was the one who would give out stickers each morning as the other children came in.  This little scraper LOVED this duty! He was so excited each Sunday – he would come up to my desk eagerly to see what kind of stickers I’d brought for that day.  I knew he loved Disney characters, so I naturally bought lots and lots of Disney character stickers for him to give out.

He became my biggest buddy and an absolute golden child in my class.  His parents told me a million times how much he loved “Mrs. Joi” and that he never wanted to leave my class.  To this day, of all the precious children I ever taught, this little man remains one of my absolute favorite.

Naturally, the desire to be great isn’t reserved just for young people.  Whether we admit it or not, we all want to be great!  In the same way a loving parent or Sunday School teacher would encourage a small child to find  areas in which they can achieve greatness and improve their self worth, we should encourage ourselves as well.  We should seek out ways to express ourselves and to push our boundaries.

The same could (and should) be said of our spouses, adult children, friends, relatives, and co-workers.  We should be ever mindful of the fact that our every word and action either encourages or discourages those we love.  Unless I have any monsters who read Self Help Daily… and I’m pretty sure I don’t!… none of us would ever, ever, ever want to discourage someone we care about.

If you’re anything like me, you actually care more about your spouse and children achieving greatness than yourself!

Make a point to encourage rather than discourage and instruct rather than insult.  Find areas in which you can feel great and encourage others around you as they pursue their own greatness.  A word of caution, though:  Never try to find someone else’s greatness for them.

Doesn’t work.

You can’t WILL someone else to go in a direction just because you want them to.  Their path is their own choice, no one else’s.  Remember, you’re their supporting cast – not their director.

May each of you achieve greatness that absolutely rocks your world!