Listen to episode 234 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Self-Improvement Begins Now | Classic Self-Help Books. Edited and adapted from A Book of Cheerful Counsel by Nixon Waterman.
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Today’s reading was edited and adapted from A Book of Cheerful Counsel by Nixon Waterman, published in 1909.
LEARN to do, but without overdoing. Too much striving for success is as bad as too little. Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues. Do not cram books into your head until you crowd pleasant thinking out of it. A moderately informed person, standing firmly on their two good legs, is superior to the wise professor who is unable to leave their bed.
What have you profited, if you gain the whole world, and lose your own soul? And what does it profit you, if you become a multi-millionaire and lose your health of mind or body? Success that costs more than it is worth is failure.
Make haste slowly. Be ambitious, but not foolish. Learn a few things, and learn them well. The person who grasps much, holds little. We all know that there is a happy medium between too much preciseness and slovenliness; between laziness and an unwarranted degree of mental activity; between ignorance and an intellect ground to an edge too fine to carve its way through a hard world.
The mind should be a good, strong, healthy feeder, but not a glutton. When unduly stimulated, it wears out the mechanism of the body, like friction upon a machine not lubricated, and the growing weakness of the physical frame nullifies the power it encloses.
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