Shownotes
Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 563 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
The Value of New Skills – Results
Thank you for joining us for our 5 days per week wisdom and legacy podcast. This is Day 563 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 on an extended 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 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 have adapted it to The Five Trails on Life’s Trek.
We are broadcasting from our studio at The Big House in Marietta, Ohio. Although it has been a cold week outside, especially compared to the mild winter, we do see new signs of spring each day. Our pair of red shoulder hawks continue daily in preparing their nest, our family of deer has been sauntering through our yard, the daffodils are blooming nicely, and the days contain progressively more hours of light with each passing week.
Although I love each season of the year, spring is especially invigorating as it brings new life to each new day. There is intrinsic value with each new flower that blooms and each new creature that is born.
As we continue on our extended trek, today we will explore the value of each new skill that we learn so that we can grow in the results that we achieve with each new skill we obtain. 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 fourth trail of this extended trek as we cover…
The Five Trails on Life’s Trek – Results Part 5
As a reminder, our overall extended trek covers these five trails:
Philosophy
Attitude
Activity
Results
Lifestyle
1. The Value of New Skills
The development of new skills is vitally important if you expect to make major progress and improve the level of your performance. A person can chop down a tree with a hammer, but it might take thirty days. By learning to use an ax, he can accomplish the same goal in thirty minutes. If he advances his skills even further and uses a chainsaw, he can accomplish the same task in about three minutes.
Life and labor get easier when knowledge is combined with new skills. Skill is the refinement of your current abilities added to the acquisition of new talents. It is the result of investigation driven by curiosity. It is the result of creativity and imagination intelligently applied to new methods. It is a product of refined attempts as emerging quality rises to new levels. Skill is also a thorough understanding of the task at hand that comes from patient study and serious observation.
Skill is what is acquired when a person becomes the master of a task. It is having full confidence in your ability and in your command of the many intricacies of your jobs. Skill is the process of learning. Skill is the result of accumulating a mountain of experience and the never-ending dedication to making good things better.
Those who would possess happiness and success must first master as many skills as they can gather up, blending each into all of the rest until finally a unique talent emerges. With the accumulated value of your skills and talents, all things become possible.
2. The First Step For Getting Better Results
How dramatically you can change your results is largely a function of imagination. In 1960, it was a technological impossibility for man to travel into outer space. Within ten years, however, the first man stepped out onto the surface of the moon. The miraculous process of converting the dream into reality began when one voice challenged the scientific community to do whatever was necessary to see to it that America “places a man on the moon by the end of this decade.” That challenge awakened the spirit of a nation by planting the seed of possible future achievement into the fertile soil of imagination. With that one bold challenge, the impossible became a reality.
Can a poor person become wealthy? Of course! The unique combination of desire, planning, effort, and perseverance will always work its magic. The question is not whether the formula for success will work, but rather whether the person will work the formula. That is the unknown variable. That is the challenge that confronts us all. You can go from wherever you are to wherever you want to be. No dream is impossible provided you first have the courage to believe in it.
3. If You Will Pay The Price, You Will Inherit The Promise
Solving financial difficulty is easy, but it is also easy not to solve. If the rewards are eluding you, then the best place to start is with an honest look at your results. If the results are not there, something is wrong. The lack of results is symptomatic of a problem that needs to be addressed and corrected. To ignore the symptom is merely to perpetuate the cause. Rarely will a problem repair itself. Instead, a neglected problem intensifies.
Those whose efforts have produced a poor result often have a lengthy list of reasons to justify their poor progress. To them the items on the list are not excuses; they are reasons. They blame the company, or they blame the boss. They blame taxes or the overall economy. They blame their parents or the teachers or the system. Sometimes they even blame the politicians or the overall government.
While any one of these items may not be perfect, they are not the cause of poor results. If this were the case, then no one would succeed. The fact is that in two nearly identical situations, some people have successful results, and some have dismal failures.
It almost always boils down to the price that a person is willing to pay for successful results. There is no shortage of opportunity throughout the world. There is only a shortage of those who will apply themselves to the basics that success requires. There is always a price that needs to be paid for the seeds of success and the nurturing of success to reap the harvest of success.
The question is, “Are you willing to pay the price for the success you wish to harvest, regardless of what that success means to you?” Your results will be in proportion to your investment. One of Jesus’s parables is a good example of this principle. Matthew 25:16-18 reads, “The servant who received the five bags of silver began to invest the money and earned five more. The servant with two bags of silver also went to work and earned two more. But the servant who received the one bag of silver dug a hole in the ground and hid the master’s money.” The entire story can be found in verses 14-30.
We are deliberately taking our trek slowly on The Five Trails on Life’s Trek as we continue our hike today on the Trail of Results. Today you learned that we must invest in ourselves and pay the price required for success. I am not just referring to financial success, but success in all areas of your life. To achieve better results in your life, you must plant the seeds of self-development and nurture them into new skills. Once you have these skills, then you must invest time and resources that will reap a harvest of success. This concept is rooted in the basic fundamentals of the law of planting and harvesting.
Next Philosophy Friday we will explore the importance of Checking and Measuring Results Continually. So join us next Friday for these additional insights. I know you will find these insights interesting and profitable in living a rich and satisfying life.
Our next trek is on Monday, and we will continue our series called The Tools in Gramps’ Backpack as we equip you with the tools needed to impact the lives of others. 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.
If you would like to listen to any of the past daily treks or read the associated journals, they are all available at Wisdom-Trek.com. You can also subscribe through iTunes or Google Play so that each day’s trek will be downloaded 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 on Monday!