The Key to Success
The Key to SuccessFOREWORDRUSSELL H. CONWELLIIIIIIIVVVICopyright
The Key to Success
Russell H. Conwell
FOREWORD
People are thinking, but they can think much more. The
housewife is thinking about the chemical changes caused by heat in
meats, vegetables, and liquids. The sailor thinks about the gold in
sea-water, the soldier thinks of smokeless powder and muffled guns;
the puddler meditates on iron squeezers and electric furnaces; the
farmer admires Luther Burbank's magical combinations in plant life;
the school-girl examines the composition of her pencil and analyses
the writing-paper; the teacher studies psychology at first hand;
the preacher understands more of the life that now is; the merchant
and manufacturer give more attention to the demand. Yes, we are all
thinking. But we are still thinking too far away; even the prism
through which we see the stars is near the eyes. The dentist is
thinking too much about other people's teeth.This book is sent out to induce people to look at their own
eyes, to pick up the gold in their laps, to study anatomy under the
tutorship of their own hearts. One could accumulate great wisdom
and secure fortunes by studying his own finger-nails. This lesson
seems the very easiest to learn, and for that reason is the most
difficult.The lecture, "The Silver Crown," which the author has been
giving in various forms for fifty years, is herein printed from a
stenographic report of one address on this general subject. It will
not be found all together, as a lecture, for this book is an
attempt to give further suggestion on the many different ways in
which the subject has been treated, just as the lecture has varied
in its illustrations from time to time. The lecture was addressed
to the ear. This truth, which amplifies the lecture, is addressed
to the eye.I have been greatly assisted, and sometimes superseded, in
the preparation of these pages by Prof. James F. Willis, of
Philadelphia. Bless him!My hope is by this means to reach a larger audience even than
that which has heard some of the things herein so many times in the
last forty-five years. We do not hope to give or sell anything to
the reader. He has enough already. But many starve with bread in
their mouths. They spit it out and weep for food. Humans are a
strange collection. But they can be induced to think much more
accurately and far more efficiently. This book is sent out as an
aid to closer observation and more efficient living.
RUSSELL H. CONWELL
[1]An
autobiography! What an absurd request! If all the conditions were
favorable, the story of my public life could not be made
interesting. It does not seem possible that any will care to read
so plain and uneventful a tale.I was a young man, not yet of age, when I delivered my first
platform lecture. The Civil War of 1861-65 drew on with all its
passions, patriotism, horrors, and fears, and I was studying law at
Yale University. I had from childhood felt that I was "called to
the ministry." The earliest event of memory is the prayer of my
father at family prayers in the little old cottage in the Hampshire
highlands of the Berkshire Hills, calling on God with a sobbing
voice to lead me into some special service for the Saviour. It
filled me with awe, dread, and fear, and I recoiled from the
thought, until I determined to fight against it with all my power.
So I sought for other professions and for decent excuses for being
anything but a preacher.Yet while I was nervous and timid before the class in
declamation and dreaded to face any kind of an audience, I felt in
my soul a strange impulsion toward public speaking which for years
made me miserable. The war and the public meetings for recruiting
soldiers furnished an outlet for my suppressed sense of duty, and
my first lecture was on the "Lessons of History."That matchless temperance orator and loving friend, John B.
Gough, introduced me to the little audience in Westfield,
Massachusetts, in 1862. What a foolish little school-boy speech it
must have been! But Mr. Gough's kind words of praise, the bouquets,
and the applause, made me feel that somehow the way to public
oratory would not be so hard as I had feared.From that time I acted on Mr. Gough's advice and "sought
practice" by accepting almost every invitation I received to speak
on any kind of a subject.While I was gaining practice in the first years of platform
work, I had the good fortune to have profitable employment as a
soldier, or as a correspondent or lawyer, or as an editor, or as a
preacher, which enabled me to pay my own expenses, and it has been
seldom in the fifty years that I have ever taken a fee for my
personal use. In the last thirty-six years I have dedicated
solemnly all the lecture income to benevolent enterprises. If I am
antiquated enough for an autobiography, perhaps I may be aged
enough to avoid the criticism of being an egotist when I state that
some years I delivered one lecture, "Acres of Diamonds," over two
hundred times each year, at an average income of about one hundred
and fifty dollars for each lecture.Often have I been asked if I did not, in fifty years of
travel in all sorts of conveyances, meet with accidents. It is a
marvel to me that no such event ever brought me harm. In a
continuous period of over twenty-seven years I delivered about two
lectures in every three days, yet I did not miss a single
engagement. Sometimes I had to hire a special train, but I reached
the town on time, with only a rare exception, and then I was but a
few minutes late. Accidents have preceded and followed me on trains
and boats, and were sometimes in sight, but I was preserved without
injury through all the years. In the Johnstown flood region I saw a
bridge go out behind our train. I was once on a derelict steamer on
the Atlantic for twenty-six days. At another time a man was killed
in the berth of a sleeper I had left half an hour before. Often
have I felt the train leave the track, but no one was
killed.Yet this period of lecturing has been, after all, a side
issue. The Temple, and its church, in Philadelphia, which, when its
membership was less than three thousand members, for so many years
contributed through its membership over sixty thousand dollars a
year for the uplift of humanity, have made life a continual
surprise; while the Samaritan Hospital's amazing growth, and the
Garretson Hospital's dispensaries, have been so continually
ministering to the sick and poor, and have done such skilful work
for the tens of thousands who ask for their help each year, that I
have been happy while away lecturing by the feeling that each hour
and minute they were faithfully doing good.Temple University, which was founded only twenty-seven years
ago, has already sent out into a higher income and nobler life
nearly a hundred thousand young men and women who could not
probably have obtained an education in any other institution. The
faithful, self-sacrificing faculty, now numbering two hundred and
fifty-three professors, have done the real work. For that I can
claim but little credit; and I mention the university here only to
show that my "fifty years on the lecture platform" has necessarily
been a side line of work.My best-known lecture, "Acres of Diamonds," was a mere
accidental address, at first given before a reunion of my old
comrades of the Forty-sixth Massachusetts Regiment, which served in
the Civil War, and in which I was captain. I had no thought of
giving the address again, and even after it began to be called for
by lecture committees I did not dream that I should live to deliver
it, as I now have done, almost five thousand times. "What is the
secret of its popularity?" I could never explain to myself or
others. I simply know that I always attempt to enthuse myself on
each occasion with the idea that it is a special opportunity to do
good, and I interest myself in each community and apply the general
principles with local illustrations.Russell H. Conwell.South Worthington, Massachusetts,September 1, 1913.[1]These pages are taken from an
autobiographical chapter in Doctor Conwell's previous book,Acres of Diamonds