Daily Success Habits by Nathaniel C. Fowler

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Today’s reading was edited and adapted from Beginning Right (How to Succeed) by Nathanial C. Fowler, published in 1916.

LIFE has three seasons: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. What you did yesterday overlaps into today, and what you do today is carried over into tomorrow. Which is the most important of the three? No single one of them, because any one by itself is incomplete.

If you did your duty yesterday, the work of today becomes easier to accomplish. If you attend to the work of today, tomorrow will be open to you and its duties will not be so difficult to perform. While each day has its place — yesterday, today, and tomorrow — inattention to any one of those days will materially affect the life and action of the remaining two.

You cannot recover yesterday. It has passed out of your life forever. If it was a day of mistakes, they must be corrected today or tomorrow. The importance of today is not vested wholly in today. It is in tomorrow as well. Today is yours. Tomorrow may be. Unless you anticipate the morrow today, tomorrow you will not have tomorrow well in hand.

Individuals of great accomplishment do not consider any one day as all-important. They do today’s work not wholly because it is of today, but because it will affect tomorrow. Regret yesterday if you will. Be sorry for your backsliding. You may have lost a day. If you have, you must make it up today and tomorrow.

There is more in tomorrow for you than there is in today, for tomorrow extends indefinitely into your future, while today closes with the setting sun. Everything you do, be it much or little, marks a dot on the chart of your life and extends into the immeasurable future. If it does not connect with the dot of tomorrow, you have missed a connection which might have led to success.

Render unto today the requirements of today, but so do your work that there will be no dividing gulf between today and tomorrow; for, if there is, you will have to spend much extra time building a bridge over which you are not likely to cross.

Sow the seed of today, so that it will grow in the morrow. The crop of no single day, even though it may seem sufficient, is enough to give you a profitable harvest. The well-rounded person, the individual who has made their mark, who is respected in their community, is the one who lives both for today and tomorrow; who feels their responsibility; and who connects everything they do with the good things which they have previously accomplished and with the better things which they hope to attain in the future.

The men and women of failure are the ones who are self-satisfied, who feel that when a duty is done it is finished (that they may cross it off their slate and begin something new, forgetting about the past).

Continuity is one of the principal elements in the composition of success. No one thing stands out by itself. Its value is in its connection with other things — a harmonious blending together of experience and activity, of the past, the present, and the probable future.

READ THE ENTIRE ESSAY IN EVEREST: 50 MOTIVATIONAL LIFE LESSONS

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