Cheerfulness as a Life Power by Orison Swett Marden

Let’s talk about Orison Swett Marden, who was one of the pioneering figures of the modern self-help movement, and a dude who was pretty influential popularizing the ideas associated with New Thought, the philosophy that says our thoughts and attitudes and beliefs have the power to shape our happiness and success and circumstances in life that includes dudes Wallace D. Wattles and Russell Conwell and William Walker Atkinson and James Allen. 

He was born in 1848 in New Hampshire, in a town called Thornton Grove. Unfortunately, Orison was orphaned by the time he was seven years old, and he and his two sisters spent much of their childhood bouncing from guardian to guardian.

At some point when Orison was a teenager, he encounter the Samuel Smiles book Self-Help (1859), a title that biographer Janet Browne said was “the Bible of the improving middle classes.” The book basically changed his life, inspiring and spurring a work ethic that led to earning multiple degrees from multiple schools, including an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and a Bachelor of Laws from Boston University Law School by the time he was 35 years old. Orison even spent a couple years at Andover Theological Seminary to become a clergyman before he dropped out and moved out. 

Super-driven and motivated as he was, Orison was even working at a hotel this whole time he was studying a million subjects at a million schools, working his way up from waiter to assistant clerk to becoming the manager of Ocean View Hotel in Block Island, Rhode Island. 

After getting a handful of big-shot degrees, Orison continued to ply his trade in the hospitality business. He bought the Hotel Manisses in Block Island, and became the proprietor of two more hotels in Nebraska and South Dakota. Unfortunately, in 1893, the hotel in Nebraska burned down in a fire that he escaped from, and in that fire burned some five thousand pages of manuscripts of Pushing to the Front, the book he had spent all his spare time writing. 

Margaret Connolly was a colleague of Orison’s at the publishing house that put out his books and to hear her tell it, Orison escaped the fire and immediately bought a brand-new notebook and began rewriting before the smoke from the fire even finished clearing. Without a hotel to tend to, Orison suddenly had a whole lot of time on his hands and decided to hide out in an inexpensive room to Boston and hash out the book again. 

Not only did he finish the book, he finished a second one called Architects of Fate. Publishing houses competed for Pushing to the Front, and after it was published in 1894, it became a runaway bestseller, easily the biggest personal development book that had been published up until that point. Teddy Roosevelt gave it flowers, as did fellow president William McKinley. Big-shot captains of industry like Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford all found the book inspiring.

Orison went on to write 50 more books on inspiration and success, and we are proud to present Cheerfulness as a Life Power (1899).  

Click on the book to buy Cheerfulness as a Life Power !

Cover image credit: Background map is from the public domain per Wikimedia Commons. Image of Orison is also public domain per Wikimedia Commons.

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