DON'T QUIT

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 had been mined from the thoughts of men than has ever been taken from the earth. He staked a claim and went to work with pick and shovel, aided by his friends and family.

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. The junk man 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.

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 became one of a small group of men who sell over a million dollars in life insurance annually. He owed 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.

Mr. Darby pointed out: 'Every time a prospect tried to bow me out without buying...I said to myself: 'I've gotta make this sale.' The better portion of all sales I have made were after people had said 'NO.' '

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