Excerpt from THINK AND GROW RICH by NAPOLEON
HILL
THREE
FEET FROM GOLD
One
of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken
by temporary defeat. Every person is guilty of this mistake at one time or
another. An uncle of R. U. Darby was caught by the "gold fever" in
the gold rush days, and went west to DIG AND GROW RICH. He had never heard that
more gold has been mined from the brains of men than has ever been taken from the
earth. He staked a claim and went to work with pick and shovel. The going was
hard, but his lust for gold was definite.
After
weeks of labor, he was rewarded by the discovery of the shining ore. He needed
machinery to bring the ore to the surface. Quietly, he covered up the mine, retraced
his footsteps to his home in Williamsburg, Maryland, told his relatives and a
few neighbors of the "strike." They got together money for the needed
machinery, had it shipped. The uncle and Darby went back to work the mine.
The
first car of ore was mined, and shipped to a smelter. The returns proved they had
one of the richest mines in Colorado! A few more cars of that ore would clear the
debts. Then would come the big killing in profits.
Down
went the drills! Up went the hopes of Darby and Uncle! Then something happened!
The vein of gold ore disappeared! They had come to the end of the rainbow,
and the pot of gold was no longer there! They drilled on, desperately trying to
pick up the vein again-all to no avail.
Finally,
they decided to QUIT. They sold the machinery to a junk man for a few hundred
dollars, and took the train back home. Some "junk" men are dumb, but not
this one! He called in a mining engineer to look at the mine and do a little calculating.
The engineer advised that the project had failed, because the owners were not
familiar with "fault lines." His calculations showed that the vein
would be found JUST THREE FEET FROM WHERE THE DARBYS HAD STOPPED DRILLING!
That is exactly where it was found!
The
"Junk" man took millions of dollars in ore from the mine, because he
knew enough
to seek expert counsel before giving up. Most of the money which went into
the machinery was procured through the efforts of R. U. Darby, who was then
a very young man. The money came from his relatives and neighbors, because
of their faith in him. He paid back every dollar of it, although he was years in
doing so.
Long
afterward, Mr. Darby recouped his loss many times over, when he made the discovery
that DESIRE can be transmuted into gold. The discovery came after he went into
the business of selling life insurance.
Remembering
that he lost a huge fortune, because he STOPPED three feet from gold,
Darby profited by the experience in his chosen work, by the simple method of
saying to himself, "I stopped three feet from gold, but I will never stop
because men say v no' when I ask them to buy insurance."
Darby
is one of a small group of fewer than fifty men who sell more than a million
dollars in life insurance annually. He owes his "stickability" to the
lesson he learned from his "quitability" in the gold mining business.
Before
success comes in any man's life, he is sure to meet with much temporary defeat,
and, perhaps, some failure. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and most
logical thing to do is to QUIT. That is exactly what the majority of men do.
More
than five hundred of the most successful men this country has ever known, told
the author their greatest success came just one step beyond the point at which defeat
had overtaken them. Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning.
It
takes great delight in tripping one when success is almost within reach.
