Guarding Our Capital

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 14, 1902

Guarding Our Capital

WE start out in life with a definite amount of possible energy. We can spend it as we please; but, even with the best intentions, many people use up a large part of their capital in worry, anxiety, or by fretting over non-essentials — trifles which have nothing whatever to do with their success.

If we could only learn to control our thought-force, and to expend it where it is needed, instead of allowing it to ooze out or leak away in driblets on unimportant matters, what marvels we would accomplish!

In an average lifetime, just think how much real energy, which might be turned into success-capital, has been wasted in useless expenditures and leakages! Some people spend half the power they generate in vain worry, anxiety, bickering, splitting hairs over irrelevancies.

Much of our possible success-energy is wasted through fear, which, in all its phases, is the greatest enemy of the human race — fear of failure, fear that we shall come to want, fear of imaginary happenings which have no foundation in fact, dread of criticism, forebodings about the future, fear of misfortunes that may come to our friends, ourselves, or our business. How many promising lives have been wrecked by this gloomy phantom — fear! — Selected.