February 29

This is the extra day we have every four years. Just think, if you live for eighty years, you will have twenty priceless additional days of life. On this one day in Leap Year, God gives us an extra chance at living. Perhaps we should do something special with it, something like making someone’s life a bit happier, healing a breach, or offering prayers for persons who are having a hard time of it.

February 28

If you worry, you are upset because your mind is saturated with worry thoughts. To counteract these. Mark every passage in your Bible that speaks of faith, hope, and courage. Commit each to memory until these spiritual thoughts saturate the mind.

February 27

A lightweight football player used a law of physics to overcome his small size against the giants. Knowing that momentum is the product of mass and velocity, he took to projecting himself at high speed against opponents. This bullet-like human being hurled himself against bigger men. He knocked them over like pins in a bowling alley. This is good strategy to use on big problems.

February 26

Start preparing for a happy old age when you are young—for, at seventy, you will be as you are at thirty, only more so. If you are tight with money at thirty, you will be a miser at seventy. If you talk a lot at thirty, you will be a windbag at seventy. If you are kind and thoughtful at thirty, you will be lovable at seventy.

February 25

Champions are made by playing their best game today, then tomorrow, and then the next day. Life, too, must be lived well one day at a time every day. And, in both sports and living, success is the result of a succession of more good days than bad ones.

February 24

Success in any business, or for that matter in any kind of undertaking, is determined by six simple words: find a need and fill it. In fact. these six words can be equated with practically every successful enterprise or personal career.

February 23

I knew a man who was always saying, “You know, I've half a mind to do this or that.” I told him, “Charley, you’re a half-a-minder. Everything you think of doing, you have only half a mind to do. No one ever got anywhere with only half a mind.” Success requires giving the whole self, the whole mind. Charley became an all-outer and achieved all-out success.

February 22

I remember a sign I once saw on an office wall: “He who stumbles twice on the same stone deserves to break his neck.” That may be rather harshly stated but it emphasizes the truth that a wise person does not get bogged down in a psychology of mistakes or allow errors to formulate in the mind. When you make a mistake, take offensive action. Once is enough.

February 21

When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. Remember, there is no situation so completely hopeless that something constructive cannot be done about it. When faced with a minus, ask yourself what you can do to make it a plus. A person practicing this attitude will extract undreamed-of outcomes from the most unpromising situations. Realize that there are no hopeless situations; there are only people who take hopeless attitudes.

February 20

Here is a good mental diet:

1. Think no ill about anyone
2. Put the best possible reaction upon everyone’s actions
3. Send out a kindly thought toward any person antagonistic to you
4. Think hopefully at all limes
5. See only the best happening

February 19

My mother used to tell me: “As you go through life, doors will sometimes shut in your face. But don’t let that discourage you. Rather welcome it—for that is the way you are pointed to the open door, the right opening for you.”

February 18

My old friend and associate, the famous psychiatrist Dr. Smiley Blanton, used to say: “No matter what has happened to a person, that individual still has within vast undamaged areas. Nature always tries to repair, so don’t become dismayed, certainly never be discouraged, when you suffer a blow.”

February 17

We are so accustomed to being alive that we take it for granted. The thrill and wonder of it doesn’t often occur to us. Do you ever get up in the morning and look out the window, or go to the door and breathe in the fresh air, and go back in and say to your spouse, “Isn’t it great to be alive?” Life is such a tremendous privilege, so exciting, that it is a cause for constant thanksgiving.

February 16

Life is not always gentle—far from it. From time to time, it will hand you disappointment, grief, loss, or formidable difficulty, often when least expected. But never forget you can surmount the worst it brings, keep on going, and make your way up again. You will find that you are stronger and maybe even better off for having had some tough experiences.

February 15

A lifetime on this wonderful and exciting earth doesn’t last very long. It is here today and gone tomorrow, so thank God every day for it. Life is good when you treat it right. Love life and it will love you back.

February 14

On Valentine’s Day I might call your attention to the law called the law of attraction—like attracts like. If you constantly send out negative thoughts, you tend to draw back negative results to yourself. This is as true as the law that lifts the tide. But a person who sends out positive thoughts activates the world around him positively and draws back to himself positive results.

February 13

A sure way to a great day is to have enthusiasm, It contains a tremendous power to produce vitality, vigor, joyousness. So great is enthusiasm as a positive motivational force that it surmounts adversity and difficulty and, moreover, if cultivated, does not run down. It keeps one going strong even when the going is tough. It may even slow down the aging process for, as Henry Thoreau said, “None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.”

February 12

Practice loving people. It is true that this requires effort and continued practice, for some are not very lovable, or so it seems—with emphasis upon “seems.” Every person has lovable qualities when you really learn to know him.

February 11

In Tokyo I once met another American, an inspiring man, from Pennsylvania. Crippled from some form of paralysis, he was on an around-the-world journey in a wheelchair, getting a huge kick out of all his experiences. I commented that nothing seemed to get him down. His reply was a classic: “It’s only my legs that are paralyzed. The paralysis never got into my mind.”

February 10

Optimism is a philosophy based on the belief that basically life is good, that, in the long run, the good in life overbalances the evil. Also that, in every difficulty, every pain, there is some inherent good. And the optimist means to find the good. No one ever lived a truly upbeat life without optimism working in his mind.

February 9

How many unhappy people suffer the mental paralysis of fear, self-doubt, inferiority, and inadequacy! Dark thoughts blind them to the possible outcomes which the mind is well able to produce. But optimism infuses the mind with confidence and builds up belief in oneself. Result? The revitalized mind, newly energized, comes to grips with problems. Keep the paralysis of unhealthy thoughts out of that incomparable instrument, your mind.

February 8

Someone tells the story of when, down in North Carolina, a man asked a weather-beaten mountaineer how he was feeling. “It's like this,” drawled the man from the hills after a few seconds of silence. “I'm still kickin’, but I ain't raisin’ any dust.” When you get right down to it, if we just keep on kickin’, there is always hope.

February 7

To maintain a happy spirit, and to do so come what may, is to make sure of a great day every day. Wise old Shakespeare tells us that “a light heart lives long.” It seems that a happy spirit is a tonic for long life. Seneca, the old Roman, also a thinker rich in wisdom, sagely observed, “It is indeed foolish to be unhappy now because you may be unhappy at some future time.”

February 6

Henry Ford was once asked where his ideas came from. There was a saucer on his desk. He flipped it upside down, tapped the bottom, and said: “You know that atmospheric pressure is hitting this object at fourteen pounds per square inch. You can't see it or feel it, but you know it is happening. It’s that way with ideas. The air is full of them. They are knocking you on the head. You only have to know what you want, then forget it and go about your business. Suddenly the idea will come through. It was there all the time.”

February 5

My wife, Ruth, and I have a friend, a charming lady down South, who has the typical accent and a big smile. It is her habit every morning, rain or shine, to fling open her front door and say aloud: “Hello there. Good morning.” She explains: “Oh, I love the morning. It brings me the most wonderful surprises and gifts and opportunities.” Naturally, she has a great day every day.

February 4

To have great days, it helps to be a tough-minded optimist. Tough doesn‘t mean swaggering, sneezing, hard-boiled. The dictionary definition is a masterpiece: “Tough—having the quality of being strong or firm in texture, but flexible; yielding to force without breaking, capable of resisting great strain without coming apart.” And Webster defines optimism as “the doctrine that the goods of life overbalance the pain and evil of it, to  adverse aspects, conditions, and possibilities, or anticipate the best possible outcome; a cheerful and hopeful temperament.”

February 3

At dinner with some Chinese friends, the conversation turned to the stress and tension so prevalent today. “Bad way to live,” said an aged man present. “Tension is foolish. Always take an emergency leisurely.” “Who said that?” I asked. “I did,” he replied with a smile, “and, if you quote it, just say an old Chinese philosopher said it.” Well, it is sound philosophy. “Always take an emergency leisurely.”

February 2

I once knew an extraordinarily successful salesman who told me that every morning he says aloud, three times. “I believe, I believe, I believe.” “You believe in what?” I asked. “In God, in Jesus, and in the life God gave me,” he declared.

February 1

It is winter now and the snows can come. It’s good to warm yourself before a roaring fire on a winter’s night. Lowell Thomas, in persuading me to take up cross-country skiing, said, “To glide quietly on the snow into a grove of great old trees, their bare branches lifted to a cloudless blue sky, and to listen to the palpable silence, is to live in depth.” In return, I quoted to him Thomas Carlyle’s thoughtful line, “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.”