Money on Your Mind Before Morning

Sometimes money ends a conversation before it has even begun. You would like to change jobs, but it feels too risky. You would like to learn something new, but this is not the time. You would like a pleasant evening, yet a voice inside says that first you have to earn the right to relax.

Orison Swett Marden knew that inner language. In nineteen twenty-two, he published Prosperity: How to Attract It. Read it today, and you recognize someone who has not even opened their banking app but already feels that life is beyond their means.

Marden is interested in more than the amount of money a person has. He wants to know who we become in its company. Can we earn and preserve it? Do we allow ourselves to grow? Are we giving our entire day to fear? And have we postponed the right to enjoy life until some distant moment when there will finally be enough?

This is an inspiring book with a distinctly spiritual foundation. Marden understands God as spirit, love, and an eternal principle of good running through life. He refers to Christ and the Bible. His biographer, Margaret Connolly, describes how in his later years he belonged to no particular denomination and respected people of different convictions, including atheists and agnostics. Faith was his source of courage, support, and trust in human possibility. We will encounter it through the possibilities it opened for him.

Our course begins with the familiar feeling that a fuller life is meant for someone else. From there, we will explore a larger view of our work, abilities, and future. We will consider why a little money in reserve can create considerable freedom. How thrift differs from a life in which everything is forbidden. How a dream becomes an undertaking. And why success needs a person who has not exhausted themselves on the way to it.

You will hear contemporary stories, close examinations of familiar situations, and the voice of the book itself. We will read selected passages in Marden's original words. Where later research helps illuminate a particular idea, we will bring it into the conversation. Near the end, we will also make room for the questions that arise when an inspiring thought meets an ordinary life. What might this mean in my circumstances? Where could I begin?

You can listen on a walk, during your commute, or between the things you need to do. There is no assignment to hand in. We will return to the important connections ourselves and approach them from different directions. The complete book will be there whenever you want to read more closely.

We begin with a permission people sometimes wait years to receive. Permission to imagine more for themselves than they have already known.