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 lust for gold was definite.
After weeks of
labor, he was rewarded by the discovery of the shining ore. He need
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, the 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.”
Derby is one of the
small group of fewer than fifty men who sell more than a million
dollars in life insurance annually. He owes his “stick-ability”
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.
