Text of the meditation
Let your heart grow large and loving and unselfish, and great and lasting will be your influence and success. Cultivate a pure and unselfish spirit, and combine with purity and faith a singleness of purpose, and you are evolving from the elements an enduring success of greatness and power.
If your present position is distasteful to you, and your heart is not in your work, nevertheless perform your duties with scrupulous diligence; and while resting your mind in the idea that a better position and greater opportunities are waiting for you, keep an active mental lookout for budding possibilities, so that when the critical moment arrives and the new channel presents itself, you will step into it with your mind fully prepared for the undertaking, and with that intelligence and foresight that are born of mental discipline.
Whatever your task may be, concentrate your whole mind upon it; throw into it all the energy of which you are capable. The faultless completion of small tasks leads inevitably to larger tasks. Learn by constant practice how to husband your resources, and to concentrate them, at any moment, upon a given point.
James Allen (1864–1912), Book of Meditations for Every Day in the Year (1913) – public-domain text, gently modernised.
The original 1913 text is in the public domain.
