Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy

Welcome to Day 523 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.

This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom

Enterprise Is Better Than Ease – Activity

Thank you for joining us for our 5 days per week wisdom and legacy podcast. This is Day 523 of our trek, and today is Philosophy Friday. Every Friday we 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 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 The Big House in Marietta, Ohio. We are wrapping up a busy week of client work and podcast-related projects. Since I will be in Arizona all next week, I will be recording several episodes ahead of time, so I can focus on the financial aspect of our construction projects while I am on site.

The next five weeks will be a busy time of traveling, along with the extra tax work that we need to complete for our clients and our own companies. There are certain deadlines that have to be met, and we will need to stay very focused on the tasks that need to be completed. This ties into the topic of our trek today on the Trail of Activity, as we will explore why Enterprise Is Better than Ease, and why we need to plan The Ratio of Activity to Rest so we do not burn out on our quest and become unable to complete it.

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 third trail of this extended trek as we cover…

The Five Trails on Life’s Trek – Activity Part 3

As a reminder, our overall extended trek covers these five trails:

Philosophy

Attitude

Activity

Results

Lifestyle

1. Enterprise Is Better Than Ease

If you are involved in a project, how hard should you work at it? How much time should you invest? Your philosophy about activity and your attitude about hard work will affect the quality of your life.

What you decide about the correct ratio of labor to rest will establish a certain work ethic. That work ethic, which is your attitude about the amount of labor you are willing to commit to your potential future fortune, will determine how substantial or how meager that fortune turns out to be.

Enterprise (or it could be referred to as initiative) is always better than ease. Every time you choose to do less than you could, this error in judgment has an effect on your self-confidence. Repeated every day, you will soon find yourself not only doing less than you should, but also being less than you could. The accumulative effect of this error in judgment can be devastating.

Fortunately, it is easy to reverse the process. Any day you choose you can develop a new discipline of doing rather than neglecting. Every time you choose action over ease or labor over rest, you develop an increasing level of self-worth, self-respect, and self- confidence. In the final analysis, it is how you feel about yourself that provides the greatest reward from any activity. It is not what you get that makes you valuable, it is what you become in the process of doing which brings value to your life. It is activity that converts your dreams into your reality, and that conversion from idea into actuality gives you a personal value that can come from no other source.

Everything has its price, and everything has its pain, but the price and the pain become easy when the promise becomes strong. In order for your life to be filled with intense activity, you must be obsessed by the outcome or that is to say, by the promise of the future. The results will not merely support the activity. The inspiration you get from seeing the results clearly in your mind will enable you to produce the results.

2. The Ratio of Activity To Rest

With the understanding that enterprise is better than ease, you also have to understand that life cannot be a process of all work and no rest. It is important to set aside sufficient time to regain your strength. The key is to develop a reasonable ratio of rest to activity.

The Bible offers this philosophy about the ratio of labor to rest – six days of labor and one day of rest. Some people may feel that this seems somewhat heavy on the labor side. In fact, there are some people in our country and throughout the world who are at odds even with the current ratio of five days of labor and two days of rest. They would have us trim back even further on the labor side and increase the rest period to at least three days.

You must decide the ratio that best reflects the reward you are seeking, remembering that with diminished labor comes diminished rewards. If you rest too long, the weeds will surely take over your garden of life. The erosion of your values begins immediately whenever you are at rest. That is why you must make rest a necessity, not an objective. Rest should only be a necessary pause in the process of preparing for an assault on the next objective and the next discipline. The punishment for excessive rest is mediocrity.

The Bible gives us the best example of the proper ratio. Even from the creation of the world, God performed his creation activities in six days and then rested on the seventh. Genesis 2:2 says, “On the seventh day God had finished his work of creation, so he rested from all his work.”

God does not need the rest himself, but we do. So He gave us His pattern. We need to take advantage of the six days of focused work and then take a complete day for resting and re-energizing. Exodus 34:21 is one of the several verses that lays out the proper ratio of work and rest, “You have six days each week for your ordinary work, but on the seventh day, you must stop working, even during the seasons of plowing and harvest.”

We are deliberately taking our trek slowly on The Five Trails on Life’s Trek as we continue our hike on the Trail of Activity. Today we learned that Enterprise is Better Than Ease, but we must also establish the proper Ratio of Activity to Rest.

Next Philosophy Friday, we will continue on the Trail of Activity and explore the danger in seeking shortcuts to success, and that change begins with choice. Join us next Friday for additional insights. I know you will find these insights interesting and profitable in living a rich and satisfying life.

Our next trek on Monday will continue our new series call The Tools in Gramps’ Backpack, where we will equip you with the tools you need 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 our past treks or read the Wisdom Journal, they are available at Wisdom-Trek.com.

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:

1. Live Abundantly (Fully)
2. Love Unconditionally
3. Listen Intentionally
4. Learn Continuously
5. Lend to others Generously
6. Lead with Integrity
7. 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!