Why We Fail

THREE FEET FROM GOLDOne 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 that 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 at ----------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 took 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, Derby
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
then 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.
(extract from book – Think and Grow Rich – author Nepoleon Hill)