As we stood there in that musty old mill, Mr. Darby repeated the story of the unusual conquest, and finished by asking, “What can you make of it? What strange power did that child use, that so completely whipped my uncle?”
The answer to his question will be found in the principles described in this book. The answer is full and complete. It contains details and instructions sufficient to enable anyone to understand, and apply the same force which the little child accidentally stumbled upon.
Keep your mind alert, and you will observe exactly what strange power came to the rescue of the child; you will catch a glimpse of this power in the next chapter. Some-where in the book you will find an idea that will quicken your receptive powers, and place at your command, for your own benefit, this same irresistible power. The awareness of this power may come to you in the first chapter, or it may flash into your mind in some subsequent chapter. It may come in the form of a single idea. Or, it may come in the nature of a plan, or a purpose. Again, it may cause you to go back into your past experiences of failure or defeat, and bring to the surface some lesson by which you can regain all that you lost through defeat.
After I had described to Mr. Darby the power unwittingly used by the little colored child, he quickly retraced his thirty years of experience as a life insurance salesman, and frankly acknowledged that his success in that field was due, in no small degree, to the lesson he had learned from the child.
Mr. Darby pointed out: “Every time a prospect tried to bow me out, without buying, I saw that child standing there in the old mill, her big eyes glaring in defiance, and I said to myself, ‘I’ve gotta make this sale.’ The better portion of all sales I have made were made after people had said ‘no.’”
He recalled, too, his mistake in having stopped only three feet from gold. “But,” he said, “that experience was a blessing in disguise. It taught me to keep on keeping on, no matter how hard the going may be, a lesson I needed to learn before I could succeed in anything.”
This story of Mr. Darby and his uncle, the colored child and the gold mine, doubtless will be read by hundreds of men who make their living by selling life insurance, and to all of these, the author wishes to offer the suggestion that Darby owes to these two experiences his ability to sell more than a million dollars of life insurance every year.
Life is strange, and often imponderable! Both the successes and the failures have their roots in simple experiences. Mr. Darby’s experiences were common-place and simple enough, yet they held the answer to his destiny in life, therefore they were as important (to him) as life itself. He profited by these two dramatic experiences, because he analyzed them, and found the lesson they taught. But what of the man who has neither the time nor the inclination to study failure in search of knowledge that may lead to success? Where, and how, is he to learn the art of converting defeat into stepping stones to opportunity?
In answer to these questions, this book was written.