Three Feet From Gold

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.