Tag Archives: Orison Swett Marden

“There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something better tomorrow.”

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“There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something better tomorrow.”

– Orison Swett Marden, early self-help writer

We all have them: good days, and not so good days. If you would like to increase the number of good ones, work on your optimism muscle, always hoping for (and, yes, working toward) a better future.

Consider the difference between the hopeful worker on a Friday, looking forward to the weekend, versus the sad and blue individual on a Sunday evening, not so delighted about the Monday ahead.

Exercise:

Ask yourself these questions, whether you are in a good mood or not, to provide yourself and others with a tonic for a better tomorrow:
• What am I looking forward to?
• What can I work on today, to make my tomorrow better?
• How can I be a catalyst for others to have their tomorrows be great too?

#69: “There are powers inside of you, which, if you could discover and use…”

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“…would make of you everything you ever dreamed or imagined you could become.”

– Orison Swett Marden

What are we capable of? What is our fullest potential as human beings? Perhaps we can consider the Guinness Book of World Records – or the Olympics – as a starting point.

We might think about great feats in areas such as:

  • Speed at running, or swimming (Ye Shiwen and Cameron van der Burgh both set new world records for swimming in the 2012 Olympics)
  • Endurance and strength (Kim Un-Guk set a weightlifting world record)
  • Throwing, climbing, jumping, shooting… (a team from the Republic of Korea set an archery world record)
  • Writing and speaking
  • Mathematics and sciences
  • Mastery in the arts, music, or other creative disciplines
  • Memory (such as in a spelling bee)

Exercise:

With the above capacities already realized by human beings, what would a “world-record you” be capable of?

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