The Most Important Thing by Earl Nightingale
Ask yourself: “What’s the most important thing on earth as far as a human being is concerned?” I think it is truth. Truth is knowledge, and truth is honesty. To the extent that a person has knowledge and honesty, they are rich. Mirabeau once said: “If honesty did not exist, we ought to invent it as the best means of getting rich.” Shakespeare wrote: “To be honest as the world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.” Both of them were right.
To be ignorant is to be poor. It does not have to do with money, necessarily, although one seldom finds a person with knowledge who is not getting along well in the world. They may not be wealthy in the conventional sense, but they have enough for their needs, and they’re enormously wealthy in many important ways. A person will enjoy life, the world, and people to the extent that they move away from ignorance and toward knowledge. Perhaps just as important, or even more so, the degree to which a person has truth and knowledge will determine their degree of freedom as an individual. Every human being has to be born ignorant and, for a time, live in ignorance. But if they remain ignorant, that is their own fault. The fight against ignorance waged by everyone during his or her lifetime must be an individual, personal thing. No one can give us truth. Another person can point out the truth and urge us to strive to make it our own, but it is far too great a thing to be received passively. It must be searched for actively if it is to have significance. We can be inspired to search for truth, but unless we find it for ourselves it will do us little good.
“The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom—they are the pillars of society.” —Henrik Ibsen
A strong man cannot make a weak man strong. But a weak man can make himself strong by following a planned course of action for a given time, and of course, a strong man can make himself stronger.
To my way of thinking, each of us has the opportunity for freedom and the wealth that comes with knowledge and understanding. If we decide to stop before we have reached our riches, we should blame no one but ourselves. I believe a man is poor to the extent that he is ignorant, because the riches and the freedom he seeks—if he is truly seeking them—are all around him. They are under his feet and perched on his shoulder; they are in public library and the corner bookstore. Truth and the riches it brings surround us every day of our lives. If we do not see them, we are poor indeed. Horace Mann put it this way: “Keep one thing forever in view—the truth; and if you do this, though it may seem to lead you away from the opinions of men, it will assuredly conduct you to the throne of God.”
This is an excerpt from Earl Nightingale’s Successful Living in a Changing World, an official Nightingale-Conant publication. Known as the “Dean of Personal Development,” Earl Nightingale grew up in California during the Great Depression. Because his family was very poor, Nightingale educated himself in his local library. His main focus: what makes people turn out the way they do in terms of their wealth, their career achievements, and their happiness. After beginning his career in the US Marines during World War II, he was hired as a radio announcer. He eventually became a popular daily broadcaster for CBS. Through his interest in both personal development and audio, he partnered with Lloyd Conant to form the Nightingale-Conant Corporation, the world’s largest producer of audio programs. Sign up to receive free samples from Sound Wisdom’s Nightingale-Conant Collection here.