the toy of chance, or that true success is the result of accident or fate?
No; luck is not God’s price for success, nor does He dicker with men. When we consider the few who owe fortune or position to accident or luck, in comparison with the masses who have to fight every inch of the way to their own loaves, what are they, in reality, but the exceptions to the rule that character, merit —not fate, or luck, or any other bogy of the imagination—controls the destinies of men? The only luck that plays any great part in a man’s life is that which inheres in a stout heart, a willing hand, and an alert brain.
What has chance ever done in the world? Has it invented a telegraph or telephone? Has it laid an ocean cable? Has it built steamships, or established universities, asylums, or hospitals? Has it tunneled mountains, built bridges, or brought miracles out of the soil?
What did luck have to do with making the career of Washington, of Lincoln, of Daniel Webster, of Henry Clay, of Grant, of Garfield, or of Elihu Root? Did it help Edison or Marconi with his inventions? Did it have anything to do with the making of the fortunes of our great merchant princes? Do such men as John Wanamaker, Robert Ogden, or Marshall Field owe their success to luck?
Many a man has tried to justify his failure on the ground that he was doomed by the cards which fate dealt him, that he must pick them up and play the game, and that no effort, however great, on his part, could materially change the result. But, my young friend, the fate that deals your cards is in the main your own resolution. The result of the game does not rest with fate or destiny, but with you. You will take the trick if you have the superior energy, ability, and determination requisite to take it. You have the power within yourself to change the value of the cards which, you say, fate has dealt you. The game depends upon your training, upon the way you are disciplined to seize and use your opportunities, and upon your ability to put grit in the place of superior advantages.
Just because circumstances sometimes give clients to lawyers and patients to physicians, put commonplace clergymen in uncommon pulpits, and place the sons of the rich at the head of great corporations even when they have only average ability and scarcely any experience, while poor youths with greater ability, and more experience, often have to fight their way for years to obtain ordinary situations, are you justified in starting out without a chart or in leaving a place for luck in your programme? What would you think of a captain of a great liner who would start out to sea without any port in view, and trust to luck to land his precious cargo safely?
Did you ever know of a strong young man making out his life-programme and depending upon chance to carry out any part of it? Men who depend upon luck do not think it worth while to make a thorough preparation for success. They are not willing to pay the regular price for it. They are looking for bargains. They are hunting for short cuts to success.
We hear a great deal about “Roosevelt’s luck”; but what would it have availed him if he was not ready for the opportunity when it came—if he had not trained himself through years of persistent drill to grasp it—if he had not been prepared to make the best use of it?
I have never known a man to amount to much until he cut out of his vocabulary such words as “good luck” and “bad luck,” and from his life-maxims all the “I can’t” words and the “I can’t” philosophy. There is no word in the English language more misused and abused than “luck.” More people have excused themselves for poor work and mean, stingy, poverty-stricken careers, by saying “luck was against them” than by any other plea.
That door ahead of you, young man, is probably closed because you have closed it—closed it by lack of training; by a lack of ambition, energy, and push. While, perhaps, you have been waiting for luck to open it, a pluckier, grittier fellow has stepped in ahead of you and opened it himself. Power gravitates to the man who knows how. “Luck is the tide, nothing more. The strong man rows with it if it makes toward his port; he rows against it if it flows the other way.”
When Governor John A. Johnson, of Minnesota, was asked, “How do you account for your success?” he answered, simply, “I just tried to make good.” You will find, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, that the man who tries to make good is the “lucky man.” Young Johnson had to fight against poverty, heredity and environment—everything that could be put forward as an excuse for “bad luck,” or “no chance,” yet in his hard battle with fate he never once faltered, or whined, or complained that luck was against him.
One of the most unfortunate delusions that ever found its way into a youth’s brain is that there is some force or power outside of himself that will, in some mysterious way, and with very little effort on his part, lift him into a position of comfort and luxury. I never knew any one who followed the ignis fatuus,—luck—who did not follow it to his ruin. “Good luck” follows good sense, good judgment, good health, a gritty determination, a lofty ambition, and downright hard work.
When you see horses in a race, you know perfectly well that the one in the lead is ahead because he has run faster than the others, and you would not have much sympathy for the horse behind if he should bemoan his fate and declare that the horse ahead had a snap! When you see any one doing better than you are doing under similar circumstances, just say to yourself, “There must be some reason for it. There is a secret back of it, and I must find it out.” Do not try to ease your conscience or lull your ambition by pleading “hard luck” for yourself, or good fortune for another.
Napoleon said that “God is always on the side of the strongest battalions.” He is always on the side of the best prepared, the best trained, the most vigilant, the pluckiest, and the most determined. If we should examine the career of most men who are called lucky, we should find that their success has its roots far back in the past, and has drawn its nourishment from many a battle in the struggle for supremacy over poverty and opposition. We should probably find that the “lucky” man is a closer thinker than the “unlucky” man, that he has a finer judgment, that he has more system and order; that his brain acts more definitely and concisely, that he thinks more logically, more vigorously, and that he is more practical. Life is not a game of chance. The Creator did not put us where we would be the sport of circumstances, to be tossed about by a cruel fate, regardless of our own efforts.
Chapter XVII.
Success With A Flaw
“JUST now the American people are receiving some painful lessons in practical ethics,” said President Nicholas Murray Butler, recently. “They are having brought home to them, with severe emphasis, the distinction between character and reputation. . . . Of late we have been watching reputations melt away like snow before the sun. . . . Put bluntly, the situation which confronts the American people to-day is due to the lack of moral principle.”
Never before in the history of our country have the American people received a greater shock to their faith in human nature than during the past year, by the exposure of the diabolical methods practised by men in high places upon an admiring and unsuspecting people.
Every little while the public press throws X-rays upon the characters of men who have long stood high and spotless in the public eye, and have been looked up to as models of manhood, men of honorable achievement—revealing great ugly stains of dishonor, which, like the blood spot on Lady Macbeth’s hands, all the oceans of the globe cannot wash out.
A tiny flaw sometimes cuts the value of an otherwise thousand-dollar diamond down to fifty dollars or less. The defect is not noticeable to the average person. It is only the fatal magnifying glass that will detect it, and yet its presence is a perpetual menace to the commercial value of the stone.
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