Read! Read something every day. Discipline yourself to a regular schedule of reading. In fifteen minutes a day you can read twenty books a year.

Each moment of your life is a brush stroke in the painting of your growing career. There are the bold, sweeping strokes of one increasing, dynamic purpose. There are the lights and shadows that make your life deep and strong. There are the little touches that add the stamp of character and worth. The art of achievement is the art of making life-your life-a masterpiece.

Champion the right to be yourself; dare to be different and to set your own pattern, live your own life, and follow your own star.

It is great to love life. Accept life as a precious gift from the hand of God and strive to make the most of it.

Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest creative thinkers of all time, strongly recommended the habit of meditation in the dark. He wrote: "For I have found in my own experience that it is of no small benefit, when you lie in bed in the dark, to recall in imagination, one after another, the outlines of the form you have been studying." He often awoke to find his problems solved. Da Vinci would often stand silent and motionless before a painting for hours, without using his brush, as though waiting for spiritual guidance.

Decision is the spark that ignites action. Until a decision is made, nothing happens.... Decision is the courageous facing of issues, knowing that if they are not faced, problems will remain forever unanswered.

Big thinking precedes great achievement.