Man must find his own salvation.
Success, so far as it is not mere luck, depends on two things in you: your free energy and the skill with which you apply it to the task at hand. So, you see, if you wish to begin life at forty, you must settle two large personal questions first of all. You must find work and play that call for no more energy than you can afford to spend on them. Then you must train your mind, eye, and hand to the point of working and playing with ease, grace, and precision.
Five levels of energy appear in five varieties of work:
- Pure thinking burn up less of life's fuel than any other human activity.
- Thinker expresses himself in written language.
- Public speaking and acting.
- Handling and modeling of material things.
- Arduous toil of managing people.
The energy transformed to keep the body running is called basal metabolism, while the excess used for special activities may be called marginal metabolism or free energy.
After forty, sensible people lead the simplified life.
The simplified life is one from which all striving that does not further self-realization has been skillfully purged. The indispensables receive the full force of one's energies. Not one ounce power is frittered away on the superfluous. The job of growing up is largely a matter of sloughing the little desires in favor of the great. We simplify, we pull in, we concentrate on a few powerful, enduring wishes. Though the gross volume of energies may dwindle somewhat, we use them more efficiently. Thus we heighten our chances of success and achievement.
The man who begins living at forty knows what he wants to do. If he doesn't know that much, he cannot begin to live. For know what one desires is much more important than getting the desire. When a man does not know what he needs at forty, it is vain to sell him a course.
People spend all their energies in one or more of five major enterprises:
- Struggle to grow up. School didn't teach people how to live their lives. Many people are still children in many respects.
- Scheme for wealth or power or fame according to the best pioneer tradition. Inner growth never occurs. The turtle remains all shell.
- As parents revel in dictating their children's morals and careers, or as husbands neglect their wives, or, as wives neglect their husbands. They find no sane middle ground.
- Hang-over Puritans. They dictate other people's morals and affairs, enacting endless laws.
- Struggle to keep up with the Joneses, to conform in every least detail, from club membership to straw hats, lest they become objects of scorn. Thus they obliterate the last faint trace of their own personalities.
So while fools die young, superior people learn to live late. As for the average citizen, he goes on working, colorless and inert, neither a joy to himself nor a burden to anybody else.
Just as freedom is only the free, and power for the powerful, so with living: life begins at forty for those who have something to love for and in and by.
The American myth: 1. time is money; 2. happiness is found only in service; 3. a man finds his highest self-realization in his work.
Time isn't money. It can never reduced to money. He cannot give away his minutes. He cannot borrow minutes from a friend. He cannot steal minutes. Time is the inmost stuff of life itself.
I have known people who have succeeded marvelously by making it an inflexible rule to think first of time and only incidentally of money.
The richest man I have ever known has never had more than $500 to his name at any one time. He has always done what he wanted to do. But he has never acted on impulse. He has minutely and deliberately studied out a program of time spending for one or two years ahead. He has weighed all of his interest as scrupulous as a pawn broker weighs a diamond brought in for hocking. No miser has ever calculated to the remoter decimal points with more skill than he. Yet he has no interest in money. He never works an hour more than necessary. Thanks to his skill in organizing his life, his days are seldom cluttered with tasks for which he has no taste.
Not one man in a thousand can afford to knock off at forty and enjoy himself for the rest of his days.
Most Americans cling to the faded shreds of a pioneer outlook in which harsh toil, ceaseless striving, overshrewdness, animal cunning, and crude piety blend badly.
The Frenchman does not confuse living with making a living. He understands that, in the life of reason, it is a platitude that men work only for the sake of enjoying life. He who toils for anything else is a fool!
Reading is the heart and soul of culture in its highest form.
As Leonardo pointed out centuries ago, no man is so big a fool that he cannot succeed in one thing, if he persists in it.
The art of living seldom centers around the job. It does so only for artists, philosophers, scientists, and a few other lucky fellows.
Emancipating yourself so that you are free to master the art of living is largely the reward of character. It is a matter of self-insight, self-planning, and self-control.
After forty, we endeavor to find some way of making the worthwhile activities of leisure as cheap, as simple, and as easy as possible without destroying their substance.
Not a man in a million under forty is worth listening to except for gag lines and clowning. The most brilliant coversationalists I have ever known, indeed, were all over sixty-five.
We learn best what absorbs us.
What a man does before forty does not matter. --Henry Ford
In this age of mathematics and psychology, few men can find themselves in the first half of life.
Before forth, we may be excellent students, but almost never scholars; learned, but not wise; broadly informed, but not experienced. For time is the essence of scholarship, wisdom, and experience.
Wordsworth resolved to organized all his intelligence, energies, and poetical powers to the single end of creating a titanic philosophy "Man, Nature and Society!" And how many of us have, again like Wordsworth, worked on and on for fifty years without finishing the task.
Everything depends upon the skills you have shown in choosing your grandparents and in managing yourself before forty.
The brain is never more than half developed and usually not even 1/5 used. Our central nervous system is less than half formed even at death.
The lack of vigorous use of brain leads to prompt decay. And I believe it will some day be rigorously demonstrated that most healthy people who fail to live richly after forty have only their own sloth or stupidity to blame. they will have crippled themselves before forty by indolence, by shirking, and by inane frivolity. The lady who lives the life of a butterfly in her twenties must expect to die young as butterflies do. Men of high and active intelligence are, as any life-insurance expert can tell you from his own records, notoriously long-lived; and this is no odd chance but rather the effect of mental stimulation.
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