Podcast Excerpt: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast. If you enjoy our podcast, you probably also enjoy audio-books. So, I’m happy to announce that we’ve arranged a free offer with Audible.com, a global provider of high-quality digital audio books.

While our podcast focuses on works from classic, and often long forgotten, authors, Audible is a great place to discover contemporary self-development books. A couple choices that I might recommend are The Little Book of Big Change by Amy Johnson and Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life.

To start your 30-day free trial, which includes one free audiobook, go to audible.com/inspirational. Or you can text the word [inspirational] to the number 500-500…..

Today’s reading was edited and adapted from Stepping-Stones to Success by Horace D. Hitchcock, published in 1916.

The first requisite to success is the ability to agree that opportunity is a circumstance within the reach of everyone. Opportunity, thus, is a signal sign to success.

If the ability to reach opportunity is inherent in every one of us, it follows that success itself, which is born of opportunity, is possible to every human being. How often we have heard the expression, “Luck seems to follow them wherever they go.” But it was not luck. In fact, luck or chance is a very small factor to any success.

When we study the biographies of successful men and women, we find in every instance, discounting some rare exceptions, that certain fundamental principles of success have been strictly followed. These principles may have been followed consciously or unconsciously. But the goal of success has always been and always will be attained by adherence to definite laws governing the power of mind over matter; and when these laws are studied, assimilated, and put into practice, the resulting achievement will be Success — a complete accomplishment of a definite aim.

Become a patron of the Inspirational Living podcast to get access to the full transcript and access to the Our Sunday Talks series: http://livinghour.org/patron.

Subscribe to the Inspirational Living Podcast at iTunes & Stitcher

All transcripts from our inspirational podcasts are edited adaptations of the original work and copyrighted by LivingHour.org.