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 '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.