A Life of Goodness
Teach Yourself First
A 5-minute read
You can wait your whole life for someone to motivate you. Or you can become your own good influence.
A teacher once passed through a town and gave the crowd a simple instruction: live with the quiet awareness that life doesn’t last — let that truth keep you awake and good, rather than careless. Then he moved on. Most people nodded, went home, and forgot all about it by the next morning, sliding right back into the old carelessness.
But one young woman — only sixteen, a weaver’s daughter — took it to heart and didn’t let it go. For three whole years, with no one checking on her and no one to keep her at it, she kept practicing what she’d been told. She became, in the old book’s lovely phrase, her own good friend. The teacher and his crowd were long gone. She taught herself.
When the teacher returned three years later, he asked her a few riddling questions in front of everyone — where do you come from, where are you going — and she answered in a way the crowd found baffling but he understood completely. She had actually done the inner work. While everyone else had been waiting for the next inspiring visit, she had quietly become someone.
The people who change don’t wait to be motivated. They learn to be their own good influence.
This is the part of growth nobody can do for you. A teacher, a book, a course like this one can point — but the daily, unglamorous practicing, on the ordinary days when no one’s watching and no one’s cheering, is yours alone. The weaver’s daughter had no audience and no accountability. She had only herself, choosing again each day. And that turned out to be enough.
It’s tempting to outsource our motivation — to wait for the right teacher, the right group, the right burst of inspiration. But the most reliable influence in your life is the one you become for yourself. Learn to encourage yourself, correct yourself gently, keep yourself going. Then you’re never waiting.
What’s one thing you keep wishing someone would push you to do? Could you become that push for yourself?
Picture being your own good friend about it — encouraging, patient, but not letting yourself off the hook. What would that voice say?
Take a breath. There's no rush to the next page.
Where this comes from
From “Learn to Teach Yourself,” the story of the weaver’s daughter who practiced on her own for three years.