Eleanor Roosevelt: Conquer Your Fear By Doing What's Frightening & Learn By Living

Eleanor Roosevelt endures as one of the most beloved and influential luminaries in modern history – a relentless champion of working women and underprivileged youth, the longest-serving American First Lady, and the author of some beautiful, if controversial, love letters.

When she was 76, Roosevelt penned You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life (public library) – a relentlessly insightful compendium of her philosophy on the meaningful life.

Roosevelt considers the seedbed of happiness:

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. After a short time, a very short time, there would be little that one really enjoyed. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people.

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Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: 'A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.'

Indeed, personal integrity – without which it is impossible to be honest with oneself – is a centerpiece of our capacity for happiness. In a chapter titled "The Right to Be an Individual," Roosevelt considers the moral responsibility of living what you believe – of fully inhabiting your inner life – as the foundation of integrity and, more than that, of what it means to be human:

It's your life – but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

Read more here.