Ladder of Success

Author: (American) Gideon Powell
Translator: Liu Chen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-04-01
Features: Dr. Powell's speeches and writings have influenced and changed the lives and destinies of generations. He has offered profound insights on career choices, mate selection, overcoming (decline), and achieving success, providing great inspiration. Every aspiring individual should read his books. — Franklin D. Roosevelt
Yes, read them! This book includes a preface and ten chapters, covering ten topics related to success and life, such as confidence, career choices, reading, love and family, lifestyle habits, facing adversity, social interactions, problem-solving, new perspectives, and balancing work and rest. It is highly suitable for middle-aged and young adults, offering valuable guidance for inspiring young people to strive for success in their careers. The purpose of this book is to provide readers with practical life skills through real-life examples, encouraging them not to be defeated by difficulties and offering methods to help aspiring individuals achieve success.
Excerpt: In the United States, six million sleeping pills are consumed every night!! There is a fundamental difference between relaxing "sunbathing" and the laziness of "sunbathing." If you sit in the sun to relax, think about the sun, think about nature, and harmonize yourself with nature, achieving unity with the universe. In this way, sitting in the sun is not laziness. On the contrary, it is the best way to restore energy. It replenishes your energy, not by forcing it but by providing it for you to use. Relaxation and rest are processes of restoring energy and enhancing creativity. This process is continuous. A person's life is also a continuous process of releasing and replenishing energy. If a person lives according to a certain rhythm, continuously releasing and restoring energy, then they can live and work with ease. This is what is known as the "way of the military and the civil": tension and relaxation.
"In the United States, six million sleeping pills are consumed every night." Several years ago, when I gave a speech at a pharmaceutical factory, they told me this astonishing fact. The number seemed unbelievable, but health officials told me it was a conservative estimate. An authority figure told me that Americans actually consume 120 billion sleeping pills daily to ensure that only one out of twelve people get sleep. Statistics show that the use of sleeping pills has increased by 1000% in recent years, and the latest data is even more shocking. According to the Vice President of the United States, a major pharmaceutical company produces 6.935 billion sleeping pills annually, meaning we use an average of 19 million pills daily. How frightening is that situation!
Sleep is a natural process of restoring energy. Some people might think that after a day's work, people can fall asleep peacefully. However, it is clear that Americans have not even mastered the art of sleeping. They are so tense that a pastor who had the opportunity to conduct extensive experiments reported in a study that Americans' nerves were so frayed that even sermons could no longer put them to sleep. This is truly a tragic fact. A Washington official who loves numbers told me that last year, 750 million Americans visited doctors for headaches, meaning each person had about 50 headaches per year. I didn't ask how he obtained this number, but after our conversation, I saw a report saying that the pharmaceutical industry had sold 11 billion pounds of aspirin in the past year. Perhaps our era can be defined as the "Aspirin Age," as one writer put it.
According to authoritative data, half of the hospital beds in the United States are occupied by patients not due to accidents or organ diseases but because of psychological and emotional issues.