THREEFEET 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.
reacAfter 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, say 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