Other writers have fully and accurately
describedthe road, and my only hope is
that these hastily written lines will inspire the young man or
young woman to ariseand
go.Russell H. Conwell.
I
Success has no secret. Her voice is forever ringing through
the market-place and crying in the wilderness, and the burden of
her cry is one word—WILL. Any normal young man who hears and heeds
that cry is equipped fully to climb to the very heights of
life.The message I would like to leave with the young men and
women of America is a message I have been trying humbly to deliver
from lecture platform and pulpit for more than fifty years. It is a
message the accuracy of which has been affirmed and reaffirmed in
thousands of lives whose progress I have been privileged to watch.
And the message is this: Your future stands before you like a block
of unwrought marble. You can work it into what you will. Neither
heredity, nor environment, nor any obstacles superimposed by man
can keep you from marching straight through to success, provided
you are guided by a firm, driving determination and have normal
health and intelligence.Determination is the battery that commands every road of
life. It is the armor against which the missiles of adversity
rattle harmlessly. If there is one thing I have tried peculiarly to
do through these years it is to indent in the minds of the youth of
America the living fact that when they give WILL the reins and say
"DRIVE" they are headed toward the heights.The institution out of which Temple University, of
Philadelphia, grew was founded thirty years ago expressly to
furnish opportunities for higher education to poor boys and girls
who are willing to work for it. I have seen ninety thousand
students enter its doors. A very large percentage of these came to
Philadelphia without money, but firmly determined to get an
education. I have never known one of them to go back defeated.
Determination has the properties of a powerful acid; all shackles
melt before it.Conversely, lack of will power is the readiest weapon in the
arsenal of failure. The most hopeless proposition in the world is
the fellow who thinks that success is a door through which he will
sometime stumble if he roams around long enough. Some men seem to
expect ravens to feed them, the cruse of oil to remain
inexhaustible, the fish to come right up over the side of the boat
at meal-time. They believe that life is a series of miracles. They
loaf about and trust in their lucky star, and boldly declare that
the world owes them a living.As a matter of fact the world owes a man nothing that he does
not earn. In this life a man gets about what he is worth, and he
must render an equivalent for what is given him. There is no such
thing as inactive success.My mind is running back over the stories of thousands of boys
and girls I have known and known about, who have faced every sort
of a handicap and have won out solely by will and perseverance in
working with all the power that God had given them. It is now
nearly thirty years since a young English boy came into my office.
He wanted to attend the evening classes at our university to learn
oratory."Why don't you go into the law?" I asked him."I'm too poor! I haven't a chance!" he replied, shaking his
head sadly.I turned on him sharply. "Of course you haven't a chance," I
exclaimed, "if you don't make up your mind to it!"The next night he knocked at my door again. His face was
radiant and there was a light of determination in his
eyes."I have decided to become a lawyer," he said, and I knew from
the ring of his voice that he meant it.Many times after he became mayor of Philadelphia he must have
looked back on that decision as the turning-point in his
life.I am thinking of a young Connecticut farm lad who was
given up by his teachers as too weak-minded to learn. He left
school when he was seven years old and toiled on his father's farm
until he was twenty-one. Then something turned his mind toward the
origin and development of the animal kingdom. He began to read
works on zoology, and, in order to enlarge his capacity for
understanding, went back to school and picked up where he left off
fourteen years before. Somebody said to him, "You can get to the
topif you will!"He grasped the hope and nurtured it, until at last it
completely possessed him. He entered college at twenty-eight and
worked his way through with the assistance that we were able to
furnish him. To-day he is a respected professor of zoology in an
Ohio college.