The Fundamentals of Life

By Isaiah Vander Maas

The Fundamentals of Life explores life from a Christian perspective, focusing on what prevents so many of us from being successful.

Too often, people fail to overcome obstacles because they have the wrong mindset—and it’s time to identify shortcomings, seek to overcome them, and look to God for guidance. After all, He is the one who gives us the chance to be successful, and all good things come from Him.

When you fully trust God and give your mind to Him, He will expand you and grow you in ways you never thought possible. By applying the lessons in this book, you’ll be able to:

• leverage the law of attraction to bring the positive into your life;
• take control of fear and use it for motivation;
• identify mentors to help you on your journey;
• take a technician’s approach to life rather than a lab rat’s approach.

The big takeaway is that to navigate the complexities of life, you must have a positive mindset—and believe in the Lord. Find out how to do it, step by step, with this guidebook to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781489738615

Isaiah Vander Maas

Isaiah Vander Maas, an up-and-coming Christian author who works from home, has a high school diploma from Maplewood Richmond Heights in St. Louis, Missouri. He comes from an adopted family of nine and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He wrote this book to give people a clearer perspective on the crucial ideas that play a big role in establishing success.

Book preview

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

Fear as Motivation

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Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world. The only way to conquer your fear is to do the thing that you fear. Why let fear hold you back when you can use fear as motivation? Sometimes we need to flip the script on life and get the best out of it by turning the negatives into positives and not giving up so easily.

At Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration on Saturday, March 4, 1933, to become the thirty-second president of the United States of America, he introduced an inspirational quote that would sweep the nation and forever be remembered. He said, The only thing to fear is fear itself. At first take there doesn’t seem to be much to the quote, but if you take time to break down and understand the full essence and core meaning of what he was saying, you’ll find that there’s much more truth and value in the quote than you initially realized.

What Franklin D. Roosevelt was alluding was that fear deprives us of opportunities to grow and thrive in life, if we allow it to eat away at our hearts. But when we learn how to control and utilize fear to our advantage, we can exceed the limits and expectations of the things that we thought were possible.

What many people fail to understand is that life is nothing but energy. The energy that we give out is the energy that we get back. I will be touching on this subject much more in the upcoming chapters Law of Attraction and Knowledge Is Power, but I just wanted to reference this nugget of wisdom because of everything in this book ties to it in some way.

Don’t be afraid to fail. As ironic as it sounds, failure is only a stepping-stone to success because you learn from your mistakes. We all know that when a child is born, it cannot walk. Eventually and gradually (usually after about three months), it begins crawling and then walking. It tries and falls over, time and time again. It’s that way with life. We need to fail many times before we can learn to be successful. What separates successful people from those who aren’t is that successful people don’t allow the fear of failure to stop them from making progress. They use fear as motivation.

Many people are born with disabilities, defects, or even life-threatening diseases that ultimately lead to their deaths. But what many call disabilities and defects, some call blessings in disguise because they give people the opportunity to challenge themselves and build their true characters amidst their hardships, although it isn’t always easy.

There’s a right type of fear, and there’s a wrong type of fear. Too often, people are afraid of the wrong things in life like the fear of what people think of them and fitting in rather than being afraid of not being the best that they can be, regardless of what other people’s opinions are and peer pressure.

This is your life. The things that other people think about you ultimately don’t matter, as long as you’re not hurting yourself or anyone else. You’re the captain of your own ship and the controller of your own destiny. Don’t let other people’s opinions and negative inputs easily sway you just because they’re afraid of not following the norm.

The famous NBA all-star legend Michael Jordan was most likely ridiculed as a kid for striving to be in the league, let alone be the greatest basketball player of all time. But he did just that. He didn’t give into the fear of people’s opinions. He was rejected by his high school basketball team, which led him to turn his fear into motivation and come back stronger the next year to make the team. Isn’t it when we are at our weakest that we have the opportunity to become the strongest versions of ourselves? Never doubt yourself.

Another very insightful quote from the Netflix show The Witcher says, You can’t outrun destiny just because you’re afraid of it. It still comes. Whether we want to accept it or not, the world will test our abilities to overcome fear. Will you be ready?

More often than not, we tend to compare ourselves to others because we’re afraid that we’re not meeting the standards of the norm. We compete and try to be better than our peers are. The only person you should be competing with is yourself so that you