Few Feet Away | Inspirational | Desire

Few Feet Away | Inspirational | Desire

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.

A man was caught by the “gold fever” in the gold rush days and went to DIG. 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, told his relatives and a few neighbors of the "strike.” They got together money for the needed machinery, had it shipped. The first car of ore was mined and shipped to a smelter. The returns proved they had one of the richest mines in their hands. 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. Then something happened! The vein of gold ore disappear! They had come to the end of the rainbow and the pot of was no longer there! They drilled on, desperately trying to up the vein again-all to no avail. 

Finally, they decided to QUIT.

They sold the machinery to a junk man for a few dollars and return 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 THEY 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 that 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, he 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, The man profited by the experience in his chosen work, by the simple method of saying himself, “I stopped three feet from gold, but I will never stop because men say 'no' when I ask them to buy insurance.” The man 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 that 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.