October 31

Ever practice remembered peacefulness? I think of a favorite spot in Switzerland, remembering how, at evening time, the snows on the mountains change coloring from brilliant gold to mystic purple and then fade into the dark. I think of a night on the China Sea when mists veiling the face of the moon were blown aside by a gentle breeze to allow long, silvery shafts of moonlight to fall on limpid waters. I think of a night at Srinagar in the Vale of Kashmir, where the sound of singing boatmen came across the lake on the surface of which water lilies floated. Once in my doctor's office, my pulse and blood pressure readings were taken. "Well!" he said, "that's fine. You have learned to live calmly." I told him the technique of remembered beauty to help promote tranquility. He nodded, "Good, that helps in keeping healthy."

October 30

Basic in living creatively is to accept pain and difficulty as a challenge. God, who made this universe, gives us difficulties for our own best interest. He wants to make something of us and people do not grow strong in soft and fortuitous circumstances. Struggle toughens personalty.

October 29

When you attain a sense of undefeatableness, you will always be high-spirited and confident. Spirit is taken out of you when you allow yourself to be overwhelmed, nonplussed, and stymied by circumstances and conditions. An important secret of success is to get yourself firmly based in spiritual understanding, in faith and positive thinking. Then nothing, no matter what, can defeat you. You will have attained indomitability.

October 28

We are continuously building up or breaking down the self. Through the years, every thought, every emotion, every experience contributes to the quality of self. No matter how old or how set we become, self is in the making. Everything contributes to its greatness or littleness, its stagnation or growth. What will your contribution be today?

October 27

Experience bears out the thesis that things go wrong because we are wrong. If we resolutely seek to understand where we're wrong and make changes, we are on our way to better things. "Most of the shadows of this life," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, "are caused by standing in our own sunshine." When we get busy changing attitudes that have been casting shadows and making things go wrong, then things start going right. A changed person changes situations and conditions.

October 26

Here are five simple and workable rules for overcoming inadequacy attitudes and for learning to believe in yourself:

1. Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop this picture as fact. Never think of yourself as failing; never doubt the reality of the mental image.
2. Whenever a negative thought concerning your ability comes to mind, deliberately voice a positive thought to cancel it out.
3. Do not build obstacles in your imagination. Depreciate every so-called obstacle. Minimize them. Difficulties must be studied and efficiently dealt with, but they must be seen only for what they are. They must not be inflated by fear thoughts.
4. Do not be awestruck by other people or try to copy them. Nobody can be you as efficiently as you can.
5. Ten times a day repeat these words: "If God be for me, who can be against me?" (See Romans 8:31).

October 25

Get worked up about your job and you will work your job up. Get fired up about about it and you will put fire into it. Any human occupation has excitement in it if you have excitement in you. And how do you find this excitement? A famous French writer answered with these words: "Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as a treasure."

October 24

I continually advocate that you be a true optimist, rugged mentally, a real believer. No doubt-thinking person can be an optimist, for an optimist is a person who believes in good outcomes even when he can't yet see them. That is also the Bible's definition of faith as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." So the real believer is a person who believes in better things when there is yet no evidence to confirm his expectation. He is one who believes in his own future even when he cannot see much possibility in it.