Whoso has achieved the purpose or has obtained the thing that he
desires has attained Success.
There be wise ones who say that success has been cornered and
monopolized and opportunities are slendering. There are still others
who assure us that they have a formula; that the “greedy rich” have
not the monopoly that envy attributes to them. There be socialists,
anarchists, disciples of Henry George, of John Alexander Dowie, and
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who have prescriptions warranted to transplant
one from Rag Alley to the desirable side of Easy Street. When you get
through taking their nostrums step around to the fool’s office and let
her enlighten you.
Success is within you, I say. The attainment of your ideal is success;
if not, then what is? Blame no one (even yourself) if you fail in the
realization of your ideal. You get what you want if you want it.
I do not pretend to have a hard-and-fast definition of success, that
can be photographed and sent on application for inspection and approval.
“He has made a success who has obtained the fulfillment of his
strongest desire.”
Do not permit the supernally wise to dissuade you by interposing some
other interpretation of success. Neither heed the successful man’s
advice, for unless you fail he cannot succeed, hence his advice is for
his and not your success. Take a fool’s advice and shun those who would
dazzle you with a description that does not apply to an achievement of
the real thing which you most desire.
Why should you delude yourself with chasing after something you don’t
want, because a sage has told you that it is that which you ought to
want? Your own ideal is clear enough. You do not require the medicine
men of your tribe to concoct ideals for you. You have a multitudinous
stock of desires on hand. Make your selection. Set the chosen one on a
pinnacle and have no other gods before it.
Fame, wealth, happiness, revenge, notoriety, or any other ideal that
you set up in the holiest sanctuary, is yours if you prove faithful to
it.
Whatever your desire is you shall have. But you must not seek to
dictate by what processes it will answer your call. You must be
prepared to take it by whatever route it arrives.
The price that has always been paid (there are no deadheads on the
roster) is the submergence of every aim but the achievement of the
ideal. You cannot serve two masters; you cannot have two ideals. The
cost is marked in plain figures; it is fixed and invariable. There
are no rebates, no free-list, no slipping under the canvas. If you
want a thing you must strip yourself of all other purposes than that
of obtaining that thing. You must conquer every craving, kill every
desire, stifle every call, but the clamor of “get there!”
All that is dear to you must be held in readiness to be given in
exchange. The love of parents and children, your compassion with the
widowed and the fatherless, your virtue and comfort, and all else that
you have held dear must be sacrificed on the altar of your ideal. There
must be no looking back, lest you become a pillar of salt. However, if
it is what you most desire you will not count the cost too great. If
you falter at the cost, if you find there is something you won’t give
in payment for your ideal, you have been mistaken in your ideal; that
something which you hold back is your ideal.
You have heard your dearest friend say that she would give anything
to be rid of her bad temper. She thinks amiability is her ideal.
But you will discover that she has not selected her strongest ideal
with discrimination, for she is not ready to give everything for her
ideal of a good temper. She is willing to give everything except her
bad temper. She is not willing to pay the price. Then why should she
be favored? Why should a law be violated in her especial behalf by
giving her something she don’t want? Her bad temper is her ideal. You
are convinced that you must obey the laws of symmetry, gravity, and
proportion in construction. You get tools and instruments to make sure
that you may not go astray; even in making mud pies you observe the mud
law. Then why should you think that you can get a free pass to success?
The price of success is all, even life! To give one’s life for one’s
ideal is a privilege which only the earnest seeker of the ideal may
enjoy.
Life means death anyway. Then why should you waste it on anything
except in the payment for success? Whosoever makes his life serve his
ideal, saves it in giving. To give your life for your ideal means that
you have not lived in vain; that your life has been sold in the best
market and the highest price has been realized. To die for one’s ideal
means to be born again.
Examine the successful, and note how true they have been to their god.
Observe W-rr-n Spr-ng-r, he is in nowise distressed because ramshackle
old buildings and decrepit second-hand elevators contribute to his
ideal. Nor do the McC-rm-cks permit any twinges because labor troubles
lead to the killing of a few men and the hanging of anarchists. The
occasional burning of an oil well are not episodes of a disturbance to
the R-ck-f-ll-r ideal.
Consult not the heart when you are on the success path. (Except when
your ideal is happiness, you will find no happiness outside of your
heart.)
“Mine and Thine” is an intellectual philosophy. The heart has nothing
to do with it. The heart says Give and the mind says Get. Get success,
is an intellectual proposition. This probably explains the reasons of
the different degrees of success. It appears that W-rr-n Spr-ng-r’s
mental equipment is inferior to the R-ck-f-ll-rs and the McC-rm-ck
thought magazine.
Know also, that you must have an earnest conviction that the thing
you lust for is a primary object. My fool formula will not work in a
confusion of secondaries. See to it that you have not given the highest
seat in the synagogue to a mere adjunct. Be sure that the thing you
want is desired for itself, and not as a means of securing some other
end, else there will be the disappointment of getting the thing you
thought in your mind you wanted, rather than the real thing for which
the heart lusted.
One estimable old friend assured me that he wanted a million or two.
“Not for myself,” he insisted, “but that I may give it to the suffering
poor.”
“Then,” said I, “it will be quite the same if I were to get the million
and distribute it in accordance with your schedule.” But it wasn’t the
same at all. He wanted to be a benefactor. Not a blameworthy ideal, but
quite different from what he thought until the test was applied.
No matter what your desires may be, the satisfaction of them depends on
other people. Hence you must be circumspect in the selection of those
you use; you must see that none of them have any survival of heart.
If you have not sufficient intellect of your own to guide you, do not
despair. Let that be the least of your troubles. There are many who
are eager to render the sort of service you require. But see that the
intellect you enlist is simon-pure, and then let the substitute be your
guide. Obey orders without straying from the path. If you play your
part well your intellectual bankruptcy will not be detected. Woe to you
if you are not true to the intellectual manager! Society will condone
anything if intellect stands guard to set you right, but intellectual
insolvency is never forgiven.
Remember, it is sometimes wise to appear foolish; do not indulge in
asking questions--for often there are no answers. And sometimes it is
necessary to back up to get a better start.
It is essential to have public approval while we are on the success
path. It is indispensable! It is so easy to secure the approbation of
the public that one is not justified in attempts to defy public opinion
unless your ideal be love of justice. In such case public opinion be
hanged! Public opinion for revenge will hang you, but your ideals will
survive the gallows and the cross. Public opinion can be molded by
the press. Arson will be condoned if there is a spice of adventure in
burning down a distillery, or blowing up an oil well, to say nothing
of wrecking banks and corporations. Robbery by rebates and other
discriminations presents no difficulties; and murder, if we can procure
it by the militia or the hangman, is respectable. These diversions are
incidents of success, and comport with the ideal in whose service they
are enlisted.
You will have to join the Combine of Modern Saints. A gift now and then
to a hospital, church, or libraries and social settlements when in
season, also have their appointed time; and occasionally art is quite
the vogue.
The people will give you anything you want if you’ll but ask in the
right way. They care not if you kill some of them, or rob them all, but
do it beautifully. They will prove loyal if your rapacities are cloaked
with “Law and Order” and your misdemeanors tagged “virtue.” They will
let you denude them if you accomplish it in the name of civilization.
Be true to the _esprit de corps_ of success. No man can be successful
enough to stand alone. Only the success of failure can indulge that
luxury. And above all, avoid any tendency to being natural. You will
fail if you allow love any play. Nevertheless, at times you are
expected to manifest symptoms of love. This entails the necessity of
becoming an imitator. A good article of make-believe will be effective
as the genuine in the atmosphere in which your lot is cast. The moment
you yield to love you have failed; success will tolerate but one God.
Let me repeat: If you be an earnest seeker for success, your heart
must be dead and the whole campaign shifted to the intellect. That,
too, is dead, but the intellect being wise is too wise to know of the
deadness of its death. It continues in galvanic imitation of life. One
Chicago millionaire has been dead for forty years, but so excellently
galvanized is he, that the administration on his estate is postponed
from day to day. When seen in his automobile only last week he had a
very natural, life-like look in his eyes, but the death grip on his
wallet emitted the odors of the tomb.
This essay is not written for the benefit of the wise in order to
convince them of the efficacy of changing their ideal. They will not
accept my foolishness any more than I will bow down before their
wisdom. It is the ideal of the wise to establish ideals for others.
Let them air their wisdom. They, too, have a province in this world of
many mansions. I do not begrudge them the space they cumber, nor do I
commiserate the victims of their wisdom. Not that it is my ideal to
decry the wondrous wise! That is a bit of _en passant_ by-play with
which I amuse myself while resting for intervals in the pursuit of my
central ideal.