Shownotes
Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 448 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
The Five Trails on Life’s Trek – Philosophy Part 6
Thank you for joining us for our 5 days per week wisdom and legacy podcast. This is Day 448 of our trek, and today is Philosophy Friday. Every Friday we will ponder some of the basic truths and mysteries of life, and how they can impact us in creating our living legacy. Currently, we are in a multi-week trek as we explore the teachings from some of my virtual mentors, such as Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar, and Earl Nightingale.
The core of our current trek is based primarily on Jim Rohn’s book called The Five Major Pieces to the Life Puzzle. I have learned a considerable amount from reading and re-reading this book on my own trek of life, and I trust that it will benefit you also. Keeping with the continuity of Wisdom-Trek, I will be adapting it to The Five Trails on Life’s Trek.
We are broadcasting from our studio at Home2 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Just as the seasons of the year are changing rapidly, sometimes the seasons of our lives do also.
As you know if you have journeyed with us on our Wisdom-Trek for any length of time we travel monthly between The Big House in Marietta, Ohio, and Home2 in Indian Trail, North Carolina. A couple of weeks ago Paula and I made the decision to consolidate back to The Big House full time and sell our North Carolina home. We knew that we would eventually make the move, but it came much sooner than we anticipated.
After analyzing the current housing market and looking at our longer-term financial goals, we feel that it is prudent for us to make the move now. Once the decision was made, the pace of the move accelerated. Based on our realtor’s advice, we have decided to move all of our household belongings and vacate the house this week. This will allow the home to be on the market and available immediately.
So, if all goes according to plan, we will be heading north on Saturday with a U-Haul truck full of furniture and other household items. We would appreciate your prayers as we make this move. We do know that it is God’s will for us, but it is difficult leaving family and friends in North Carolina. Of course, we also have family and friends in Marietta, Ohio, as well. This decision is certainly in line with our personal philosophy that we have for our lives.
As we consider our personal philosophy, on our trek for today, we will continue on the first of five trails on life’s trek, which is the Philosophy Trail. Specifically, we want to continue our exploration of How to Develop a Powerful Personal Philosophy.
If you have missed the past few Philosophy Friday treks, it would be good to go back and review them to get caught up on our progress so far. We have a lot of ground to cover today, so let’s break camp and continue on the first trail of this extended trek as we cover…
The Five Trails on Life’s Trek –Philosophy Part 6
As a reminder, our overall extended trek will cover these five trails are:
Philosophy
Attitude
Activity
Results
Lifestyle
Last week on our hike you discovered how important self-improvement which leads to self-mastery is to an overall successful life. If you do not improve yourself, you are doing a disservice to you and those you impact.
In your continuing search for knowledge and understanding, there is another major discipline that will help you to capture the information around you so that your future will be better than your past. That discipline is keeping a personal journal. A journal is a gathering place for all of your observations and discoveries about life. It is your own handwritten or application driven transcript, narrated in your own words, which capture the experiences, ideas, desires, and conclusions about the people and events that have touched your life.
A journal provides you with two remarkable benefits. First, it allows you to capture all aspects of the present moment for future review. The events that take place in your life, experiences that you live and learn from, should not just “happen.” They should be captured so that your lessons can be an investment in your future. The past, when properly documented, is one of the best guides for making good decisions today that will lead to a better tomorrow.
While it is true that every event is recorded in the brain, you cannot always access the specifics surrounding those events at will. Often, the details can become blurred or distorted over time. You may remember the outcome, but you may have forgotten the exact sequence of events or the decisions that were made. Without accurate information to enhance your recall of the past, you run the risk of repeating many of the same errors over and over again.
Without a journal those special moments and those milestones of emotion and experience will be blown by the winds of your own forgetfulness into a deep corner of your mind where their value will become lost forever. The emotion of that special moment, unless captured in a journal, will soon fade. You may recall the event, but you will have lost the emotion.
The second benefit of keeping a journal is that the very act of writing (either manually or electronically) about your life helps you to think more objectively about your actions. Writing tends to slow down the flow of information. As you pause to gather your thoughts about an event you are trying to capture on paper or within an application, you have time to ponder and to analyze the experience. You begin to see more clearly the sources of your information, the facts on which you based your decisions, and the action you are taking in response to your beliefs. In other words, it is not just the event but also your personal philosophy that comes under intense scrutiny in the process of capturing your life and recording it. It is this intense scrutiny that enables you to make refinements to your philosophy that are truly life-changing.
The discipline of keeping a journal also develops your ability to communicate more effectively. The more you practice capturing events and emotions with words, audio, pictures, and videos, the more clearly you are able to communicate not only your ideas but also the inherent value that exists within you.
Most men and women of accomplishment maintain and frequently review their personal journals. It is second nature to them. They seem to possess an inherent instinct that tells them that a life worth living is a life worth documenting. In fact, the process of making a deliberate and consistent habit of recording in journals may well be a major reason for their rise to above-average levels of achievement.
It is the small disciplines in life that lead to great accomplishments. When average people give care and attention to important matters, their own growth into greatness merely awaits the passage of time. Both small disciplines and minor mistakes in judgment tend to accumulate the former to your benefit and the latter to your detriment.
Neither success nor failure occurs in a single cataclysmic event. Both are the result of the accumulation of seemingly small and insignificant decisions whose collective weight over the period of a lifetime presents the individual with his or her proportionate reward. It goes back to the laws of planting and harvesting.
The use or the neglect of journals is not indispensable to the achievement of success, but the use of a journal is an important piece of the trail of life called philosophy. By neglecting the journal, life’s trails may lead you off course.
Surely your life is worth more than a birth certificate, a gravestone and a million dollars in consumed goods and services compressed between those major milestones in your life. Journals are the tools that enable you to document the details of the failure as well as the progress of your existence, and in the process, allows you to become more than you otherwise might have been.
In many places of the world we are rapidly becoming passive intellects. The continued neglect of your reading and your writing skills will lead to increasingly undisciplined thinking habits. How many of our citizens are involved in violent or white-collar crimes? How many of our children are dropping out of school? We are becoming a society of poor thinking habits, poor values, poor decisions, and a lack of personal responsibility.
Society as a whole cannot become stronger until our attention to the essentials of life begins to change. We need to infuse values and integrity that do not change with the current winds of political correctness into our society. The ability to establish more competent leadership in our government, our schools, our churches, our businesses, and our communities lies in the emerging value of the individual.
Before society at large can change, we must first change ourselves. That is why you must make a commitment to develop your full human potential, one discipline at a time, one book at a time, and one small entry in your journal at a time. By changing your personal philosophy, your life will change, which in turn, will change the lives of those you impact. If you don’t currently journal, I will encourage you to start. Check out the Wisdom-Trek Journals that are available in the Legacy Store at Wisdom-Trek.com.
We are deliberately taking our trek slowly as we ponder How to Develop a Powerful Personal Philosophy on our continued hike up the Trail of Philosophy today. This is not an easy hike to make. It requires studying and absorbing new information that may challenge your current philosophy. It requires the discipline to journal your activities and progress that will help to build a strong foundation in your life.
Next week during Philosophy Friday, we will explore the importance of the decision-making process in your pursuit of a powerful personal philosophy. Make sure to join us for the continuation of our trek on the Trail of Philosophy next Friday. I know you will find these insights interesting and profitable in living a rich and satisfying life.
Our next trek will be Motivation Monday when we will explore more trails of how to get and stay motivated to bring value to your world. So, encourage your friends and family to join us, and then come along on Monday for another day of our Wisdom-Trek, Creating a Legacy.
That will finish our trek for today. As you enjoy these daily doses of wisdom, we ask you to help us grow Wisdom-Trek by sharing with your family and friends through email, Facebook, Twitter or in person and inviting them to come along with us each day. If you would like to listen to any of the past daily treks, they are available at Wisdom-Trek.com. Don’t forget to subscribe to Wisdom-Trek so each trek will be downloaded to you automatically.
Thank you for allowing me to be your guide, mentor, and most of all your friend as I serve you through the Wisdom-Trek podcast and journal.
As we take this trek of life together, let us always:
- Live Abundantly (Fully)
- Love Unconditionally
- Listen Intentionally
- Learn Continuously
- Lend to others Generously
- Lead with Integrity
- Leave a Living Legacy Each Day
This is Guthrie Chamberlain reminding you to Keep Moving Forward, Enjoy Your Journey, and Create a Great Day Every Day! See you tomorrow!