The Art of Manliness - Manvotionals - Brett McKay [29]
Take Theodore Roosevelt for example. In his sixty-year life, he served as state legislator, police commissioner, governor of New York, and president of the United States, penned over thirty-five books and read tens of thousands of them, owned and worked his own cattle ranch, formed a cavalry unit to fight in the Spanish-American War, navigated an uncharted Amazonian river, and became the first American to win the Nobel Prize.
Benjamin Franklin was another great man who accomplished much during his life. From humble beginnings as the son of a candlemaker, he became a successful printer, inventor, writer, scientist, and diplomat. He invented the lightning rod, bifocal glasses, swim fins, and a more efficient wood-burning stove. He conducted scientific experiments and inquiries into electricity, oceanography, meteorology, temperature, and light. He composed music and played the guitar, violin, and harp. He established the first public library, post office, and fire department in the United States. Oh, and in his spare time, he helped found a country.
Achievement at these awe-inspiring levels may seem impossible to the modern man, who is apt to think these men were simply of an entirely different breed. But Franklin and Roosevelt did not have special powers; whatever innate intelligence they may have been born with would have remained latent if not for their own dogged lifelong pursuit of self-education. No, the secret of their success was really quite simple. They sucked the marrow out of every minute of every single day. They had aim, purpose, and drive. They took every opportunity that came their way and created them when they didn’t. They woke up early and attacked the day’s work with vim and vigor. They were industry personified.
Each and every day we are creating our legacy. What will you be able to look back on when you’re eighty-five? A business started? A book written? A library consumed? A language learned? A child raised? Or vast expanses of time on which the mind draws a blank, an unaccounted for wasteland of life that somehow slipped through the fingers? Better get to work.
Carpe Diem.
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“Pereunt et imputantur.” (“The hours perish, and are laid to our charge.”) —Inscription on a sun dial at Oxford
The Supply of Time
FROM HOW TO LIVE ON 24 HOURS A DAY, 1910
By Arnold Bennett
Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on such-and-such a sum, and these articles provoke a correspondence whose violence proves the interest they excite. … I have seen an essay, “How to live on eight shillings a week.” But I have never seen an essay, “How to live on twenty-four hours a day.” Yet it has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money. If you have time you can obtain money—usually. But though you have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has.
Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself!
For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.
Talk about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious