Think and Grow Rich! | Page 8

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, 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.
A FIFTY-CENT LESSON IN PERSISTENCE
Shortly after Mr. Darby received his degree from the "University of
Hard Knocks," and had decided to profit by his experience in the gold
mining business, he had the good fortune to be present on an occasion
that proved to him that "No" does not necessarily mean no.
One afternoon he was helping his uncle grind wheat in an old fashioned
mill. The uncle operated a large farm on which a number of colored
sharecrop farmers lived. Quietly, the door was opened, and a small
colored child, the daughter of a tenant, walked in and 23 24 took her
place near the door.
The uncle looked up, saw the child, and barked at her roughly, "what
do you want?"
Meekly, the child replied, "My mammy say send her fifty cents."
"I'll not do it," the uncle retorted, "Now you run on home."
"Yas sah," the child replied. But she did not move.
The uncle went ahead with his work, so busily engaged that he did not
pay enough attention to the child to observe that she did not leave.

When he looked up and saw her still standing there, he yelled at her, "I
told you to go on home! Now go, or I'll take a switch to you."
The little girl said "yas sah," but she did not budge an inch.
The uncle dropped a sack of grain he was about to pour into the mill
hopper, picked up a barrel stave, and started toward the child with an
expression on his face that indicated trouble.
Darby held his breath. He was certain he was about to witness a murder.
He knew his uncle had a fierce temper. He knew that colored children
were not supposed to defy white people in that part of the country.
When the uncle reached the spot where the child was standing, she
quickly stepped forward one step, looked up into his eyes, and
screamed at the top of her shrill voice, "MY MAMMY'S GOTTA
HAVE THAT FIFTY CENTS!"
The uncle stopped, looked at her for a minute, then slowly laid the
barrel stave on the floor, put his hand in his pocket, took out half a
dollar, and gave it to her.
The child took the money and slowly backed toward the door, never
taking her eyes off the man whom she had just conquered. After she
had gone, the uncle sat down on a box and looked out the window into
space for more than ten minutes. He was pondering, with awe, over the
whipping he had just taken.
Mr. Darby, too, was doing some thinking. That was the first time in all
his experience that he had seen a colored child deliberately master an
adult white person. How did she do it? What happened to his uncle that
caused him to lose his fierceness and become as docile as a lamb? What
strange power did this child use that made her master over her superior?
These and other similar questions flashed into Darby's mind, but he did
not