Let me begin with a sort of parable. Many years ago when I was on the
staff of a great public school, we engaged a new swimming master.
He was the most successful man in that capacity that we had had for
years.
Then one day it was discovered that he couldn’t swim.
He was standing at the edge of the swimming tank explaining the breast
stroke to the boys in the water.
He lost his balance and fell in. He was drowned.
Or no, he wasn’t drowned, I remember,--he was rescued by some of the
pupils whom he had taught to swim.
After he was resuscitated by the boys--it was one of the things he had
taught them--the school dismissed him.
Then some of the boys who were sorry for him taught him how to swim, and
he got a new job as a swimming master in another place.
But this time he was an utter failure. He swam well, but they said he
couldn’t _teach_.
So his friends looked about to get him a new job. This was just at the
time when the bicycle craze came in. They soon found the man a position
as an instructor in bicycle riding. As he had never been on a bicycle in
his life, he made an admirable teacher. He stood fast on the ground and
said, “Now then, all you need is confidence.”
Then one day he got afraid that he might be found out. So he went out to
a quiet place and got on a bicycle, at the top of a slope, to learn to
ride it. The bicycle ran away with him. But for the skill and daring of
one of his pupils, who saw him and rode after him, he would have been
killed.
This story, as the reader sees, is endless. Suffice it to say that the
man I speak of is now in an aviation school teaching people to fly. They
say he is one of the best aviators that ever walked.
According to all the legends and story books, the principal factor in
success is perseverance. Personally, I think there is nothing in it. If
anything, the truth lies the other way.
There is an old motto that runs, “If at first you don’t succeed, try,
try again.” This is nonsense. It ought to read, “If at first you don’t
succeed, quit, quit, at once.”
If you can’t do a thing, more or less, the first time you try, you will
never do it. Try something else while there is yet time.
Let me illustrate this with a story.
I remember, long years ago, at a little school that I attended in the
country, we had a schoolmaster, who used perpetually to write on the
blackboard, in a copperplate hand, the motto that I have just quoted:
“If at first you don’t succeed,
Try, try, again.”
He wore plain clothes and had a hard, determined face. He was studying
for some sort of preliminary medical examination, and was saving money
for a medical course. Every now and then he went away to the city and
tried the examination: and he always failed. Each time he came back, he
would write up on the blackboard:
“Try, try again.”
And always he looked grimmer and more determined than before. The
strange thing was that, with all his industry and determination, he
would break out every now and then into drunkenness, and lie round the
tavern at the crossroads, and the school would be shut for two days.
Then he came back, more fiercely resolute than ever. Even children could
see that the man’s life was a fight. It was like the battle between Good
and Evil in Milton’s epics.
Well, after he had tried it four times, the schoolmaster at last
passed the examination; and he went away to the city in a suit of store
clothes, with eight hundred dollars that he had saved up, to study
medicine. Now it happened that he had a brother who was not a bit like
himself, but was a sort of ne’er-do-well, always hard-up and sponging on
other people, and never working.
And when the schoolmaster came to the city and his brother knew that
he had eight hundred dollars, he came to him and got him drinking and
persuaded him to hand over the eight hundred dollars and to let him put
it into the Louisiana State lottery. In those days the Louisiana Lottery
had not yet been forbidden the use of the mails, and you could buy a
ticket for anything from one dollar up. The Grand Prize was two hundred
thousand dollars, and the Seconds were a hundred thousand each.
So the brother persuaded the schoolmaster to put the money in. He said
he had a system for buying only the tickets with prime numbers, that
won’t divide by anything, and that it must win. He said it was a
mathematical certainty, and he figured it out with the schoolmaster in
the back room of a saloon, with a box of dominoes on the table to show
the plan of it. He told the schoolmaster that he himself would only take
ten per cent of what they made, as a commission for showing the system,
and the schoolmaster could have the rest.
So, in a mad moment, the schoolmaster handed over his roll of money, and
that was the last he ever saw of it.
The next morning when he was up he was fierce with rage and remorse
for what he had done. He could not go back to the school, and he had no
money to go forward. So he stayed where he was in the little hotel where
he had got drunk, and went on drinking. He looked so fierce and unkempt
that in the hotel they were afraid of him, and the bar-tenders watched
him out of the corners of their eyes wondering what he would do; because
they knew that there was only one end possible, and they waited for it
to come. And presently it came. One of the bar-tenders went up to the
schoolmaster’s room to bring up a letter, and he found him lying on the
bed with his face grey as ashes, and his eyes looking up at the ceiling.
He was stone dead. Life had beaten him.
And the strange thing was that the letter that the bartender carried
up that morning was from the management of the Louisiana Lottery. It
contained a draft on New York, signed by the treasurer of the State of
Louisiana, for two hundred thousand dollars. The schoolmaster had won
the Grand Prize.
The above story, I am afraid, is a little gloomy. I put it down merely
for the moral it contained, and I became so absorbed in telling it that
I almost forgot what the moral was that it was meant to convey. But I
think the idea is that if the schoolmaster had long before abandoned the
study of medicine, for which he was not fitted, and gone in, let us say,
for playing the banjo, he might have become end-man in a minstrel show.
Yes, that was it.
Let me pass on to other elements in success.
I suppose that anybody will admit that the peculiar quality that
is called initiative--the ability to act promptly on one’s own
judgement--is a factor of the highest importance.
I have seen this illustrated two or three times in a very striking
fashion.
I knew, in Toronto--it is long years ago--a singularly bright young man
whose name was Robinson. He had had some training in the iron and steel
business, and when I knew him was on the look out for an opening.