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Today's reading was edited and adapted from

Ambition and Success by Orison Sweat Martin, published in 1919.

Everywhere we see men and women doing the lower, the commoner things, seemingly satisfied to do them all their lives, when they have the ability to do the higher.

Many people do not start out with ambition enough to spur them to do big things. They make a

large career practically impossible at the very outset, because they expect so little of themselves.

They have a narrow, stingy view of life and of themselves, which limits their ambition to a little,

ruddy, repetitive groove. If I could give you but one word of advice, it would be that which Michelangelo

rode under a diminutive figure on a canvas in Raphael's studio, when he called on the artist

and found him out. Amplius, which is the Latin word for larger.

Raphael needed no more advice.

This one word meant volumes to him.

I advise every one of you to frame this motto,

hang it up in your room, in your store, in your office, in the factory where you work,

where it will stare at you in the face. Constant contemplation of it will make your life broader

and deeper. A fine ambition will steady your life. It will hold you to your task, keep you from yielding

to the hundred temptations that might ruin you. What chaos there would be but for a person's

ambition to get up and get on in the world and to improve their condition.

...