Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy

Welcome to Day 463 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.

This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom

Success Disciplines on Life’s Trek – Philosophy Part 9

Thank you for joining us for our 5 days per week wisdom and legacy podcast. This is Day 463 of our trek, and today is Philosophy Friday. Every Friday we ponder some of the basic truths and mysteries of life and how they can impact us in creating our living legacy.

Currently, we are in a multi-week trek as we explore the teachings from some of my virtual mentors, such as Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar, and Earl Nightingale. The core of our current trek is based primarily on Jim Rohn’s book called The Five Major Pieces to the Life Puzzle. I have learned a considerable amount from reading and re-reading this book on my own trek of life, and I trust that it will benefit you also. Keeping with the continuity of Wisdom-Trek, I will be adapting it to The Five Trails on Life’s Trek.

We are broadcasting from our studio at The Big House in Marietta, Ohio. It has been a steady week of client work, and we are making progress on unpacking all of the boxes from Charlotte.

This weekend we will be working with my brother Jack on cleaning up a couple of large limbs that came down in last week’s storm. Fortunately, neither one did any damage to our homes although Jack will need to replace a couple of sections of a small fence he has off his back porch.

The majority of the leaves continue to hang on as we enjoy the ever changing colors. Leaf harvest will occupy a good bit of our time over the next several weekends also. As with most of life, it is the simple discipline practices every day that will allow us to succeed at any task, no matter how large and overwhelming it may appear at times. This is why it is so important that we Develop a Powerful Personal Philosophy.

If you have missed the past few Philosophy Friday treks, it would be good to go back and review them to get caught up on our progress so far. We have a lot of ground to cover today, so let’s break camp and continue on the first trail of this extended trek as we cover…

The Five Trails on Life’s Trek – Philosophy Part 9

As a reminder, our overall extended trek will cover these five trails:

1. Philosophy
2. Attitude
3. Activity
4. Results
5. Lifestyle

Last week on our hike we focused on the failures in our lives which are caused by an accumulation of poor thinking and poor choices. Failure is nothing more than a few errors in judgment repeated every day. We also briefly glanced at the formula for success. As we continue our trek today, we will focus on success which is nothing more than…

1. Success Is a Few Simple Disciplines Practiced Every Day

One of the exciting things about the formula for success is that the results are almost immediate. As you voluntarily change daily errors into daily disciplines, you experience positive results in a very short period of time. When you change your diet, your health improves noticeably in just a few weeks. When you start exercising, you feel a new vitality almost immediately. When you begin reading, you experience a growing awareness and a new level of self-confidence. Whatever new discipline you begin to practice daily will produce exciting results that will drive you to become even better at developing new disciplines.

The real magic of new disciplines is that they cause you to amend your thinking. If you were to start to read books, keep a journal, attend classes, listen more, and observe more today, then today would be the first day of a new life leading to a better future. If you were to start to try harder today, and in every way make a conscious and consistent effort to change subtle and deadly errors into constructive and rewarding disciplines, you would never again settle for a life of existence, not once you have tasted the fruits of a life of substance!

There are those who would lead you to believe that you do not need discipline to change your lives, that all a person needs is a little motivation. But, it has been established that “motivation” is not how people change their lives. To change a life, you must first change your thinking habits. If a person is a fool and becomes motivated, he merely becomes a motivated fool.

To change yourself from how you are to how you want to be, you must begin with those few basics that affect the way you think. You can greatly change the course of your life by investing more time and making a greater conscious effort to refine your personal philosophy. The exciting thing is that you will not have to change all that much for the results to very quickly change for you.

• Disciplines Tend To Multiply

All disciplines affect each other. Every new discipline affects not only the discipline that you have already begun to practice but also the disciplines you will soon adopt.

Everything affects everything else. Some things affect you more than others, but everything you do has an effect on everything else you do. Not to think so is naive. This is where those little subtle errors can come from, by not knowing and understanding the effect that your errors are having on your life over an extended period of time.

There is a tendency for each of us to give ourselves license to continue an undisciplined act. We tell ourselves, “This is the only area in which I allow myself to be weak.”  This type of thinking is the beginning of delusion, for each undisciplined act tends to open the floodgates leading to other breakdowns in the chain of self-discipline. The license you give to yourself to wander even momentarily outside the boundaries of self-control establishes a subtle tendency, and the passing of time will eventually cause other self-imposed disciplines to erode.

Since every discipline affects every other discipline, you must be careful with all of them. You cannot allow yourself the luxury of indulging any error day in and day out. Remember, every liberty you give yourself to continue with an error has an effect on all of your other good habits, which in time has an effect on your future performance.

As with all aspects of life, there is the positive side. Every new discipline affects all of your other disciplines. Every new discipline that you impose on yourself will affect the rest of your personal performance in a positive way.

The key is to keep looking for every small discipline you can find that will cause you to refine your thinking, amend your errors and improve your results. You must continue looking for even the most insignificant of those errors in judgment that could be converted into a new discipline. Once the discipline cycle is started, your errors will begin to feel the effect, leaving tangible rewards in their wake as they make a hasty retreat.

· Success and Happiness Are Easy to Achieve

Taken one step at a time, all of the things that success and happiness require are actually quite easy to do. Changing from errors to disciplines is easy, as is going from failure to success. The reason why it is so easy is that you can do it, and anything you have the ability to do is always easy. Now, you may have to work hard at the daily discipline part of the equation, but reaching out with your talents to embrace success and its rewards is very easy to do.

You might be asking, “If it is so easy, why don’t more of us do it?” Because while it is easy to do the things that success and happiness require, it is also easy not to do them. This concept reminds me of a verse in Song of Solomon 2:15, “Catch all the foxes, those little foxes, before they ruin the vineyard of love, for the grapevines are blossoming!” This could very well be a parable for you to rid yourself of those little errors in judgment that happen each day before they ruin you and replace them with simple disciplines practiced each day.

We are deliberately taking our trek slowly as we ponder How to Develop a Powerful Personal Philosophy on our continued hike up the Trail of Philosophy today. This is not an easy hike to make. It requires changing your habits from failures to success. It requires a few simple disciplines practiced each day.

Next week on Philosophy Friday, we will continue our exploration of The Formula for Success and focus on the danger of neglect and listening to the right voices in your life. Make sure to join us for the continuation of our trek on the Trail of Philosophy next Friday. I know you will find these insights interesting and profitable in living a rich and satisfying life.

Our next trek will be Motivation Monday when we explore more trails of how to get and stay motivated to bring value to your world. So encourage your friends and family to join us, and then come along on Monday for another day of our Wisdom-Trek, Creating a Legacy.

That will finish our trek for today. As you enjoy your daily dose of wisdom, we ask you to help us grow Wisdom-Trek by sharing with your family and friends through email, Facebook, Twitter, or in person and inviting them to come along with us each day. I would challenge you today to take just one precept that we learn today in Proverbs and commit yourself to applying it to your life.

Thank you for allowing me to be your guide, mentor, and most of all your friend as I serve you through the Wisdom-Trek podcast and journal.

As we take this trek together, let us always:

1. Live Abundantly (Fully)
2. Love Unconditionally
3. Listen Intentionally
4. Learn Continuously
5. Lend to others Generously
6. Lead with Integrity
7. Leave a Living Legacy Each Day

This is Guthrie Chamberlain reminding you to Keep Moving Forward, Enjoy Your Journey, and Create a Great Day Every Day! See you on Monday!