In Napoleon Hill’s book “Think and Grow Rich”, he states that one of the 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. He went west and staked a claim and begin to work with a pick and shovel. After weeks of labor, he was rewarded with the discovery of the shining ore. He needed machinery to get the ore to the surface, so he went back home to Maryland and raised the money to buy the needed machinery and had it shipped. They went back to work and mined the first car of ore. The returns proved they had one of the richest mines in Colorado. Down went the drills but the vein of gold disappeared. They drilled on desperately trying to find the vein again, but never did.
Finally, they decided to quit. They sold the machinery to a junk man for a few hundred dollars and went back home. The junk man called in an engineer to look at the mine and do a little calculating. The engineer said the project failed because the owners were not familiar with fault lines. His calculations showed that the vein would be found three feet from where the Darby’s had stopped drilling. That was exactly where the gold was found. The junk man took millions of dollars of ore from that mine.
R.U. Darby learned a valuable lesson and went on the become one of the most successful insurance salesman in the country. He learned that he would not stop just because someone told him “no” in offering them life insurance. Before success comes to most people, they are sure to meet with much temporary defeat, and maybe even failures. When faced with defeat, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to quit. That is exactly what the majority of people do. More than 500 of the most successful people America has ever known have said, their greatest success came just one step beyond the point at which defeat had overtaken them.
Don’t let temporary defeat of even failures stop you from living out your dream. Don’t stop three feet from gold.
Have an awesome day and go for it.