Today we are featuring a passage from the great works of Arnold Bennett. Bennett, a very prolific British journalist and novelist in his time, explored a variety of topics and concerns in his work. Although much of his work is over a century old, it has stood the test of time and is still available in various formats today.
In 1910, Bennett released his masterpiece How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. In this text, Bennett discusses the daily gift of time as our most precious commodity, and goes on to provide legitimate suggestions on how to best use this gift wisely. Revolutionary for it’s day, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day has gone on to inspire countless other works on time management, and it’s a fairly easy task to see Bennett’s influence on them all. Now, over one hundred years later, Bennett’s lasting work is still available in multiple formats and continues to encourage and instruct those working towards improved time management and personal development.
Arnold Bennett
Below is an excerpt from Bennett’s great work. As if the words aren’t motivating and inspiring on their own, we’ve included an audio track of the great Jim Rohn reciting them. I encourage you to listen to Jim’s amazing rendition as you read the passage, and may we all be regularly reminded that the gift of time is exactly what Arnold Bennett penned so long ago – a daily miracle.
Time 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. No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.
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 commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.
I said the affair was a miracle. Is it not?
You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness — the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends! — depends on that. If one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does muddle one’s life definitely.
We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.
Dale Marcouillier founded Integress Solutions in 2011 out of a desire to share basic success principles with others. You can email Dale directly at dale@myintegress.com.
Audio track courtesy of SUCCESS Media.
