Source identified
“The foundation of success in life is good health.”
Achievement is treated as dependent on the physical capacity to work, think, and sustain effort rather than as a purely financial or professional matter.
Source note: The Art of Money Getting; Barnum places health before the business maxims that follow.
Source identified
“My race will succeed in proportion as it learns to do a common thing in an uncommon manner.”
Distinctive success can come from doing ordinary work unusually well, emphasizing thoroughness and indispensable usefulness rather than status.
Source note: Up from Slavery, Chapter XVI, “Europe,” Project Gutenberg #2376. While discussing Henry O. Tanner and recognition for excellent work, Washington restates his Tuskegee principle that advancement depends on doing useful work so thoroughly that its value becomes difficult to ignore.
Source identified
“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
Work is valuable not merely because it is difficult, but because the difficulty is attached to something judged worth doing.
Source note: Speech at Syracuse, New York, September 7, 1903.
Source identified
“The master-word is Work”
Osler makes sustained work the organizing principle of his address to medical students, emphasizing disciplined practice over brilliance without application.
Source note: The Master-Word in Medicine, address at the opening of the University of Toronto medical faculty buildings, October 1, 1903. This collection treats the line as historical professional rhetoric and not as an endorsement of excessive working hours.
Source identified
“Well done is better than well said.”
Franklin gives execution priority over impressive promises or intentions.
Source note: Poor Richard’s Almanack.
Source identified
“Diligence is the mother of good luck.”
Persistent effort improves the odds of useful results because steady work creates more opportunities for progress than waiting for favorable circumstances.
Source note: Poor Richard’s Almanack; the maxim appears in Franklin’s collected Poor Richard material.