You Learn By Living: 11 Keys for a More Fulfilling Life by Eleanor Roosevelt
I went to a small elementary school—really small—as in 22 people in my grade kind of small. And everyone knew that when you got to the fourth grade, Mrs. Brooks would be your teacher and you would do the "Famous Americans" program. It was a big deal. We spent months researching our characters, writing our speeches, and memorizing them perfectly. We gave performances at retirement homes around town. And, at the end of the school year, the whole school came to watch the performance, along with enough parents and grandparents to fill the entire gymnasium.
In my small-town fourth-grade world, choosing a good famous American and performing a wonderful speech was the equivalent of Hollywood fame.
The famous American a person chose could define him or her in people's minds for a long time to come. Point proof: I can still remember who many of my classmates chose. My best friend chose Mary Lou Retton. The popular girl? Clara Barton. The boy I had a crush on? Pistol Pete. The kid with the best country accent? Sam Houston.
I chose Eleanor Roosevelt.
As an adult, I must have asked my parents a thousand times what made me choose Eleanor Roosevelt, and their response was always the same: "I have no idea. You just wanted to be her and there was no stopping you." All these years later, I don't remember a word of the speech my fourth-grade self gave, but I can say with confidence that Eleanor Roosevelt is still shaping my life.
To this day, whenever someone mentions Eleanor Roosevelt, uses a quote by her, or talks about something she did or said, my whole body leans in.
When I visited Washington DC for the first time back in 2015, I looked up the location of her statue on the Mall and gave it a squeeze. I found an old copy of an out-of-print book she wrote at the library and asked the librarian to write down my name in case they ever wanted to sell it. I bought her book You Learn By Living: Eleven Keys For a More Fulfilling Life and read it aloud with my kids when they were in middle school as a character development exercise. I dream about meeting her for a coffee in the afterlife and asking her about her time as the first US delegate to the United Nations, her work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and what it was like to raise children as the First Lady during war-torn years. If there's such a thing as an Eleanor-Roosevelt-ophile, I might be one of them.
I'll never know if I got into sociology, women's issues, and human rights and eventually turned to writing because of Eleanor Roosevelt, or if there was something already inside of me as a fourth grader that led me to her on my path toward those things. To me, it doesn't matter.
In 1992, as a little girl on a stage wearing my great-grandmother's clothes in an attempt to look like the wife of a dead President,
I saw what was possible—that a woman could change the world through her writing and speaking and traveling the world.
I haven't been the same since.
So, in this year of books where I committed to sharing with you the writers, authors, and books that have the power to redefine a person’s life, I simply must include Eleanor Roosevelt’s You Learn By Living: Eleven Keys For a More Fulfilling Life.
Read on and I know you’ll see why I love it (and her) so much.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s 11 keys for a more fulfilling life & my favorite quotes from each:
1— Learning to Learn
“We cannot shut the windows and pull down the shades; we cannot say, ‘I have learned all I need to know; my opinions are fixed on everything. I refuse to change or to consider these new things.’ Not today. Not anymore.”
“As I look back, I think probably the factor which influenced me most in my early years was an avid desire, even before I was aware of what I was doing, to experience all I could as deeply as I could.”
“What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important ingredients in a child’s education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the adventure of life.”
“There is no human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.”
“If a child’s curiosity is not fed, if his questions are not answered, he will stop asking questions. And then, by the time he is in his middle twenties, he will stop wondering about all the mysteries of his world. His curiosity will be dead. . . Without that spirit of adventure, life can be a dull business. With it, there is no situation, however limiting, physically or economically, which cannot be filled to the brim with interest.”
2— Fear: the Great Enemy
“The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. . . You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
“Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don’t be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren’t paying attention to you. It’s your attention to yourself that is so stultifying. . . After all, there’s no real reason why you should fail. Just stop thinking about yourself.”
“Surely we cannot be so stupid as to let ourselves become shackled by senseless fears.”
“Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.”
3— The Uses of Time
“The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing what to do with their time. But if you have more projects than you have time for, you are not going to be an unhappy person. This is as much a question of having imagination and curiosity as it is of actually making plans. Things will come to you if you have the interest in the first place.”
“A woman cannot meet adequately the needs of those who are nearest to her if she has no interests, no friends, no occupations of her own. Without them, she is in danger of becoming so dependent on her children for these things that she is apt to be equally dependent when they have left home. She may give them the uncomfortable feeling that she is languishing without their companionship and so make the time they can spend together an uneasy duty and not the pleasant occasion it should be.”
“The development of interests while you are bringing up your children is important to them, too. The wider their range of experience, the greater the variety of people they encounter in their home life, the farther their horizons will extend and the more hospitable to new ideas they will be as they go out into the world. And in a world like ours today, with new conditions, new concepts, new ideas confronting us at every turn, that is an essential and a vital part of education.”
“Each of us has. . . all the time there is. Those years, weeks, hours, are the sands in the glass running swiftly away. To let them drift through our fingers is tragic waste. To use them to the hilt, making them count for something, is the beginning of wisdom.”
4— The Difficult Art of Maturity
“A few years ago, someone asked me for my definition of a mature person. Here it is: A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world all of us need both love and charity.”
“Another sign of maturity is gradually to eliminate the faults you see in yourself but that no one else knows exist.”
“To be mature you have to realize what you value most. It is extraordinary to discover that comparitively few people reach this level of maturity. . . Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.”
5— Readjustment is Endless
“Women have one advantage over men. Throughout history they have been forced to make adjustments.”
“Readjustment is a kind of private revolution. Each time you learn something new you must readjust the whole framework of your knowledge.”
“Whatever period of life we are in is good only to the extent that we make use of it, that we live it to the hilt, that we continue to develop and understand what it has to offer us and we have to offer it.”
“. . . nothing ever happens to us except what happens in our minds.”
“One must make a continuing effort to keep personal relationships warm and close, in the family as well as among friends. Human relationships, like life itself, can never remain static. They grow or they diminish. . . No relationship in this world ever remains warm and close unless a real effort is made on both sides to keep it so. You can even slip away from your children if you do not take a tremendous amount of trouble to find out what is happening to them and to keep the warmth, the closeness, alive. . . A companionship with your child must be built. It does not just happen.”
6— Learning to be Useful
“Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product.”
“It’s a curious thing, if you don’t make a parade of your unhappiness to someone else, you’ll find it is a lot easier to get over it.”
“A child who has been treated with real respect, who has a feeling that his elders expect certain standards even from a young member of the family, will behave with astonishing maturity.”
7— The Right to Be an Individual
“We are facing a great danger today—the loss of our individuality. It is besieged on all sides by pressures to conform. . . But the worst threat comes from within, from a man’s or a woman’s apathy, his willingness to surrender to pressure, to ‘do it the easy way’, to give up the one thing that is himself, his value and his meaning as a person—his individuality. It is your life—but only if you make it so.”
“Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potentiality and a contribution of some kind to one’s world. . . To leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success.”
“Your ambition should be to get as much life out of living as you possibly can, as much enjoyment, as much interest, as much experience, as much understanding.”
“Sooner or later, you are bound to discover that you cannot please all of the people around you all of the time. . . So you had better learn fairly early that you must not expect to have everyone understand what you say and what you do.”
“Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this. . . That is why I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don’t make up their minds, someone will do it for them.”
8— How to Get the Best Out of People
“Mutual respect is the basis of all civilized human relationships.”
“If you approach each new person you meet in the spirit of adventure you will find that you become increasingly interested in them and endlessly fascinated by the new channels of thought and experience and personality that you encounter.”
“Too many of us feel that any custom which is not our own is ridiculous or essentially wrong, that it is fair game for laughter or contempt. We could make no more devastating or stupid—yes, stupid—mistake. To show a lack of respect for another person’s customs is fatal to any enduring or self-respecting relationship.”
“Nobody really does anything alone. We need all the friendship, all the support, we can get. But they have to be earned.”
9— Facing Responsibility
“The responsibility has come to each of us to work out for ourselves what we believe to be right or wrong. We have to learn to think things through for ourselves. . . After all, so much that the older generation learned is wrong!”
“Why should we shy away with shame from having made a mistake? No human being is all-wise; no human being always lives up to the best that he is capable of. Failure comes to everyone, except when one does nothing at all, which itself is a failure. All we can do is to be honest with ourselves, be humble and try, as we gain wisdom, to rectify our mistakes and possibly to avoid some of them.”
“We are the sum total of the choices we have made.”
“It is not wishful thinking that makes me a hopeful woman. Over and over, I have seen, under the most improbable circumstances, that man can remake himself, that he can even remake his world if he cares enough to try.”
10— How Everyone Can Take Part in Politics
“It is not only important but mentally invigorating to discuss political matters with people whose opinions differ radically from one’s own. . . Talking over political problems and theories is useful for a variety of reasons. By having to frame your ideas and beliefs in words, you are forced to crystalize, to clarify them for yourself.”
“There is only one way of combating corruption: that is not by eschewing politics; it is by developing standards of honor, living up to them, and requiring them of our candidates.”
“Sometimes I think that the fact that, in early days, we administered the law ourselves may have affected our present attitude toward obeying the law. At that time, there was no recognized force of law to keep the peace. The situation is different today and yet too many people still live as though they were in a frontier town where they can take the law into their own hands as they see fit.”
“Because it is the most highly developed type. of government, democracy requires the most highly developed citizens. Whether we, as a whole, are willing to accept this responsibility and live up to it is something of which I cannot be sure. But we cannot be reminded too often that each of us is responsible for our attitude and our way of life, because they will in turn affect our government.”
11— Learning to Be a Public Servant
“Now and then, public apathy is jolted to awareness of the moral issues involved; their collective disapproval and the force of public opinion change the situation for the better.”
“Politics can be a dirty business when it operates on a low level. It can also be a profoundly stimulating business, when the appeal is to the best in human nature. It is, like all areas of human activity and experience, what we choose to make it.”
Today, dear reader, if you often find yourself wondering how to really live your life, how to make your days on this planet more fulfilling, more meaningful, more full of life, I hope you’ll consider picking up a copy of this timeless treasure of a book.
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