4 Life Lessons from Eleanor Roosevelt
I recently finished reading You Learn by Living by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a compilation of her own philosophy on living and her deeply held values. Published in 1960, just two years before her death, the book contains many life lessons that still resonate with us today.
Eleanor Roosevelt was an incredible woman. She inspired many people around the world as First Lady during the difficult years of the Great Depression and World War II. But she also had a prolific career on her own, serving as a delegate to the United Nations and as an influential newspaper columnist after the war.
Eleanor championed humanitarian causes throughout her life and career. She advocated for civil rights for African Americans as First Lady. She served as the first chair of the UN Commission of Human Rights, and oversaw the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
There are four important lessons I took away from Eleanor Roosevelt’s book:
- Learning to learn
- Develop courage by conquering your fears
- Success is about contributing to others
- Facing responsibility
1. Learning to learn
One of the most important skills we can teach our children, and one which we ourselves must develop and refine throughout our lives, is the ability to learn. Eleanor does not mean book learning, per se. She means a curiosity for understanding the meaning of things; a desire to form ideas and opinions from information; a sense of adventure and openness to new experiences; and an appreciation for learning from the people whom we encounter throughout daily life.
Eleanor clearly clarifies that, “By learning, of course, I mean a great deal more than formal education.”
“We obtain our education at home, at school, and, most important, from life itself. The learning process must go on as long as we live. Nothing alive can stand still, it goes forward or back. Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth.”
The important learning skills that Eleanor advocates for are threefold.
First, the ability for you to do research. “The essential thing is that he is so trained that he can use his mind as a tool, a supple instrument to dig out the facts as he needs them.”
Second, the ability to synthesize. “What counts in the long run is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person.”
Third, the ability to learn from others through dialogue. Book learning is not enough to develop valuable ideas. “It needs the supplement and the stimulus of the exchange of ideas with other people. In particular, it means learning from other people. There is no human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.”
Even as far back as 1960, when her book was written, Eleanor Roosevelt understood the importance of lifelong learning.
“Never, perhaps, have any of us needed as much as we do today to use all the curiosity we have, needed to seek new knowledge… For almost everything in our world is new, startlingly new. None of us can afford to stop learning or to check our curiosity about new things, or to lose our humility in the face of new situations.”
With the acceleration of technological and societal change over the past 60 years, this advice is even more relevant now.
2. Develop courage by conquering your fears
What holds many people back in life, according to Eleanor Roosevelt, is fear. Fear of failure, fear of what others may think, fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of loss.
“Fear has always seemed to me to be the worst stumbling block which anyone has to face. It is the great crippler… I was an exceptionally timid child… Painfully, step by step, I learned to stare down each of my fears, conquer it, attain the hard-earned courage to go on to the next.”
Eleanor’s advice for how to conquer your fears is simple — confront them head on. Have faith in yourself that you will persevere. Know that you will emerge from the current crisis even stronger.
“The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before. If you can live through that you can live through anything. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop and look fear in the face.”
In other words, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
One of the great fears people have is how they are perceived by others: “What will they think of me?” Eleanor’s advice is to stop trying to please others and just do what you truly want.
“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 any attention to you. It’s your attention to yourself that is so stultifying.”
Developing courage is liberating — it enables you to confront the risky unknown and act towards a better future. It empowers you to take responsibility and take action, rather than feeling powerless and paralyzed.
3. Success is contributing to others.
Eleanor Roosevelt discusses the subject of success many times throughout her book. According to Eleanor, success is not about money, power, or fame — it’s actually about the impact you make and your contribution to the world.
“A vast majority of people seem to think that to be a financial success is all anyone has to be. And yet, it must be evident that such success, which boils down, after all, merely to being acquisitive on a large scale, cannot have value if it is bought at the expense of others. If you step on other people’s necks to get rich, or barter your personal honor, then it is others who pay for your success and you can hardly call it your own.
“If, however, you build something that is of benefit to other people, give them an opportunity to rise with you on our upward climb, you make a contribution.
“Simply accumulating money is not, basically, a sign that one is a successful human being. A miser can do that, but as a man he is a failure. Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potential and a contribution of some kind to one’s world… To leave the world richer — that is the ultimate success.”
Many people who are solely focused on financial and career success are unhappy. On the other hand, people who had a lasting impact on the world are considered much greater success, even if they lived a life of modest means. She shares the example of Mozart, who died as a pauper, yet whose music and name lived on for hundreds of years after his death.
Eleanor observes that many people constantly feel the need to compete with others and “keep up with the Joneses.” This obsession will come at the cost of their relationships with their families and friends, and often even at the cost of their own health and happiness. Rather than obsess about material wealth and one-upping your peers, Eleanor urges you to focus on the contribution you can make to your family, your community, and the world.
4. Facing responsibility
An important aspect of living a successful life is to accept responsibility for our own actions.
“We all create the person we become by our choices as we go through life. In a very real sense, by the time we are adult, we are the sum total of the choices we have made.”
“‘It wasn’t my fault.’ That is an almost instinctive reaction to failure of any kind. But this is the point of cleavage between the mature and the immature individual. The mature person will admit, ‘It was my fault. The mistake was of my own making. Now that I understand why it happened, why I made the wrong choice, I’ll try not to make the same mistake again.’
“But the person who clings to his alibi, ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ not only is lying to himself but he is evading his responsibility. He will make the same mistake over and over and continue to feel terribly sorry for himself. The circumstances were beyond his control, weren’t they?”
By accepting responsibility for our actions, we can acknowledge our role in an outcome or a decision that was reached. This is important in a few ways. First, accepting responsibility empowers us to act and change our circumstances, rather than just settling for the status quo. We shift our mental image of ourselves from victim to protagonist in the narrative of our life. Accepting responsibility for our actions and choices gives us the confidence to play the hand that we have been dealt, rather than bemoan the cards that life has dealt us.
Second, as Eleanor mentioned in the quote above, facing responsibility enables us to learn and grow from our mistakes. Accepting responsibility means that we believe that we had the agency to take the action or make the decision that led to the bad outcome. We had the power of choice, and were not just a victim of our environment, the situation, or the actions of others. The next time we are confronted with a similar problem, we would also have the agency to take an action — and next time we would have learned from our previous mistake.
Finally, accepting responsibility builds trust and confidence in others. People put their trust in those who make tough decisions and then own the outcome. There is no quicker way to lose people’s trust then to take an action or decision, and then pin the blame on someone or something else when it fails. And since there is very little we can accomplish in life without the trust and cooperation of others, it is very important that we acknowledge our role in the outcome of events that we have influenced.
This does not mean being unnecessarily hard on yourself for making mistakes. As Eleanor Roosevelt has said:
“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 in 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.”
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote her book You Learn by Living in 1960 — when the Great Depression and World War II were still fresh memories for many people, and as the world was getting ready to confront the crisis of the Cold War. Although written 60 years ago, her lessons on life still hold true for us today.
The most important lessons I took away from her book are the following:
- Learning to learn. The important learning skills are researching information, synthesizing our own thoughts and ideas, and learning through the exchange of ideas with others.
- Develop courage by conquering your fears. Confront your fears head on, with faith in yourself to persevere and the perspective to know that you will emerge from the crisis even stronger. Don’t worry about what others may think of you — do what you want.
- Success is about contributing to others. Success is not about money, power, or fame — it’s actually about the impact you make and your contribution to the world.
- Facing responsibility. We are the sum total of the choices we have made. We must accept responsibility for our choices if we are to learn from our mistakes.
