Three feet from gold

the best-selling book responsible for helping to
create an estimated One Million Millionaires!
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 (latter part of the 19th
century).
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.