How to Succeed

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HOW TO SUCCEED;

OR,

Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune.

[Illustration]

...BY...

ORISON SWETT MARDEN, A.M., M.D.

Author of

"Pushing to the Front; or, Success Under Difficulties," and
"Architects of Fate; or, Steps to Success and Power."

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY
THE CHRISTIAN HERALD,
LOUIS KLOPSCH, Proprietor,
BIBLE HOUSE, NEW YORK.

Copyright, 1896,
BY LOUIS KLOPSCH.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER. PAGE.

I. First, Be a Man, 5
II. Seize Your Opportunity, 14
III. How Did He Begin? 27
IV. Out of Place, 49
V. What Shall I Do? 58
VI. Will You Pay the Price? 66
VII. Foundation Stones, 81
VIII. The Conquest of Obstacles, 99
IX. Dead in Earnest, 115
X. To Be Great, Concentrate, 128
XI. At Once, 140
XII. Thoroughness, 149
XIII. Trifles, 160
XIV. Courage, 169
XV. Will Power, 183
XVI. Guard Your Weak Point, 192
XVII. Stick, 209
XVIII. Save, 220
XIX. Live Upward, 229
XX. Sand, 238
XXI. Above Rubies, 256
XXII. Moral Sunshine, 275
XXIII. Hold Up Your Head, 287
XXIV. Books and Success, 296
XXV. Riches Without Wings, 318

HOW TO SUCCEED.

CHAPTER I.

FIRST, BE A MAN.

The great need at this hour is manly men. We want no
goody-goody piety; we have too much of it. We want men who will
do right, though the heavens fall, who believe in God, and who
will confess Him.
--REV. W. J. DAWSON.

All the world cries, Where is the man who will save us? We want
a man! Don't look so far for this man. You have him at hand.
This man--it is you, it is I; it is each one of us!... How to
constitute one's self a man? Nothing harder, if one knows not
how to will it; nothing easier, if one wills it.
--ALEXANDER DUMAS.

"I thank God I am a Baptist," said a little, short Doctor of Divinity,
as he mounted a step at a convention. "Louder! louder!" shouted a man in
the audience; "we can't hear." "Get up higher," said another. "I can't,"
replied the doctor, "to be a Baptist is as high as one can get."

But there is something higher than being a Baptist, and that is being a
_man_.

Rousseau says: "According to the order of nature, men being equal, their
common vocation is the profession of humanity; and whoever is well
educated to discharge the duty of a man cannot be badly prepared to
fill any of those offices that have a relation to him. It matters little
to me whether my pupil be designed for the army, the pulpit, or the bar.
To live is the profession I would teach him. When I have done with him,
it is true he will be neither a soldier, a lawyer, nor a divine. _Let
him first be a man_; Fortune may remove him from one rank to another, as
she pleases, he will be always found in his place."

"First of all," replied the boy James A. Garfield, when asked what he
meant to be, "I must make myself a man; if I do not succeed in that, I
can succeed in nothing."

"Hear me, O men," cried Diogenes, in the market place at Athens; and,
when a crowd collected around him, he said scornfully, "I called for
men, not pigmies."

One great need of the world to-day is for men and women who are good
animals. To endure the strain of our concentrated civilization, the
coming man and woman must have an excess of animal spirits. They must
have a robustness of health. Mere absence of disease is not health. It
is the overflowing fountain, not the one half full, that gives life and
beauty to the valley below. Only he is healthy who exults in mere animal
existence; whose very life is a luxury; who feels a bounding pulse
throughout his body; who feels life in every limb, as dogs do when
scouring over the field, or as boys do when gliding over fields of ice.

Dispense with the doctor by being temperate; the lawyer by keeping out
of debt; the demagogue, by voting for honest men; and poverty, by being
industrious.

"Nephew," said Sir Godfrey Kneller, the artist, to a Guinea slave
trader, who entered the room where his uncle was talking with Alexander
Pope, "you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men in the world."
"I don't know how great men you may be," said the Guinea man, as he
looked contemptuously upon their diminutive physical proportions, "but I
don't like your looks; I have often bought a much better man than either
of you, all muscles and bones, for ten guineas."

A man is never so happy as when he suffices to himself, and can walk
without crutches or a guide. Said Jean Paul Richter: "I have made as
much out of myself as could be made of the stuff, and no man should
require more."

"The body of an athlete and the soul of a sage," wrote Voltaire to
Helvetius; "these are what we require to be happy."

Although millions are out of employment in the United States, how
difficult it is to find a thorough, reliable, self-dependent,
industrious man or woman, young or old, for any position, whether as a
domestic servant, an office boy, a teacher, a brakeman, a conductor, an
engineer, a clerk, a bookkeeper, or whatever we may want. It is almost
impossible to find a really _competent_ person in any department, and
oftentimes we have to make many trials before we can get a position
fairly well filled.

It is a superficial age; very few prepare for their work. Of thousands
of young women trying to get a living at typewriting, many are so
ignorant, so deficient in the common rudiments even, that they spell
badly, use bad grammar, and know scarcely anything of punctuation. In
fact, they murder the English language. They can copy, "parrot like,"
and that is about all.

The same superficiality is found in nearly all kinds of business. It is
next to impossible to get a first-class mechanic; he has not learned his
trade; he has picked it up, and botches everything he touches, spoiling
good material and wasting valuable time.

In the professions, it is true, we find greater skill and faithfulness,
but usually they have been developed at the expense of mental and moral
breadth.

The merely professional man is narrow; worse than that, he is in a sense
an artificial man, a creature of technicalities and specialties, removed
alike from the broad truth of nature and from the healthy influence of
human converse. In society, the most accomplished man of mere
professional skill is often a nullity; he has sunk his personality in
his dexterity.

"The aim of every man," said Humboldt, "should be to secure the highest
and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and
consistent whole."

Some men impress us as immense possibilities. They seem to have a sweep
of intellect that is grand; a penetrative power that is phenomenal; they
seem to know everything, to have read everything, to have seen
everything. Nothing seems to escape the keenness of their vision. But
somehow they are forever disappointing our expectations. They raise
great hopes only to dash them. They are men of great promise, but they
never pay. There is some indefinable want in their make-up.

What the world needs is a clergyman who is broader than his pulpit, who
does not look upon humanity with a white neckcloth ideal, and who would
give the lie to the saying that the human race is divided into three
classes: men, women and ministers. Wanted, a clergyman who does not look
upon his congregation from the standpoint of old theological books, and
dusty, cobweb creeds, but who sees the merchant as in his store, the
clerk as making sales, the lawyer pleading before the jury, the
physician standing over the sick bed; in other words, who looks upon the
great throbbing, stirring, pulsing, competing, scheming, ambitious,
impulsive, tempted, mass of humanity as one of their number, who can
live with them, see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and
experience their sensations.

The world has a standing advertisement over the door of every
profession, every occupation, every calling: "Wanted--A Man."

Wanted, a lawyer, who has not become the victim of his specialty, a mere
walking bundle of precedents.

Wanted, a shopkeeper who does not discuss markets wherever he goes. A
man should be so much larger than his calling, so broad and symmetrical
in his culture, that he would not talk shop in society, that no one
would suspect how he gets his living.

Nothing is more apparent in this age of specialties than the dwarfing,
crippling, mutilating influence of occupations or professions.
Specialties facilitate commerce, and promote efficiency in the
professions, but are often narrowing to individuals. The spirit of the
age tends to doom the lawyer to a narrow life of practice, the business
man to a mere money-making career.

Think of a man, the grandest of God's creations, spending his life-time
standing beside a machine for making screws. There is nothing to call
out his individuality, his ingenuity, his powers of balancing, judging,
deciding.

He stands there year after year, until he seems but a piece of
mechanism. His powers, from lack of use, dwindle to mediocrity, to
inferiority, until finally he becomes a mere part of the machine he
tends.

Wanted, a man who will not lose his individuality in a crowd, a man who
has the courage of his convictions, who is not afraid to say "No,"
though all the world say "Yes."

Wanted, a man who, though he is dominated by a mighty purpose, will not
permit one great faculty to dwarf, cripple, warp, or mutilate his
manhood; who will not allow the over-development of one faculty to stunt
or paralyze his other faculties.

Wanted, a man who is larger than his calling, who considers it a low
estimate of his occupation to value it merely as a means of getting a
living. Wanted, a man who sees self-development, education and culture,
discipline and drill, character and manhood, in his occupation.

As Nature tries every way to induce us to obey her laws by rewarding
their observance with health, pleasure and happiness, and punishes their
violation by pain and disease, so she resorts to every means to induce
us to expand and develop the great possibilities she has implanted
within us. She nerves us to the struggle, beneath which all great
blessings are buried, and beguiles the tedious marches by holding up
before us glittering prizes, which we may almost touch, but never quite
possess. She covers up her ends of discipline by trial, of character
building through suffering by throwing a splendor and glamour over the
future; lest the hard, dry facts of the present dishearten us, and she
fail in her great purpose. How else could Nature call the youth away
from all the charms that hang around young life, but by presenting to
his imagination pictures of future bliss and greatness which will haunt
his dreams until he resolves to make them real. As a mother teaches her
babe to walk, by holding up a toy at a distance, not that the child may
reach the toy, but that it may develop its muscles and strength,
compared with which the toys are mere baubles; so Nature goes before us
through life, tempting us with higher and higher toys, but ever with one
object in view--the development of the man.

In every great painting of the masters there is one idea or figure which
stands out boldly beyond everything else. Every other idea or figure on
the canvas is subordinate to this idea or figure, and finds its real
significance not in itself, but, pointing to the central idea, finds its
true expression there. So in the vast universe of God, every object of
creation is but a guide-board with an index finger pointing to the
central figure of the created universe--Man. Nature writes this thought
upon every leaf; she thunders it in every creation; it exhales from
every flower; it twinkles in every star.

Open thy bosom, set thy wishes wide,
And let in manhood--let in happiness;
Admit the boundless theatre of thought
From nothing up to God ... which makes a man!
--YOUNG.

CHAPTER II.

SEIZE YOUR OPPORTUNITY.

"The blowing winds are but our servants
When we hoist a sail."

You must come to know that each admirable genius is but a
successful diver in that sea whose floor of pearls is all your
own.
--EMERSON.

Who waits until the wind shall silent keep,
Who never finds the ready hour to sow,
Who watcheth clouds, will have no time to reap.
--HELEN HUNT JACKSON.

The secret of success in life is for a man _to be ready for his
opportunity_ when it comes.
--DISRAELI.

Do the best you can where you are; and, when that is
accomplished, God will open a door for you, and a voice will
call, "Come up hither into a higher sphere."
--BEECHER.

Our grand business is, not to see what lies dimly at a
distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
--CARLYLE.

"When I was a boy," said General Grant, "my mother one morning found
herself without butter for breakfast, and sent me to borrow some from a
neighbor. Going into the house without knocking, I overheard a letter
read from the son of a neighbor, who was then at West Point, stating
that he had failed in examination and was coming home. I got the butter,
took it home, and, without waiting for breakfast ran to the office of
the congressman for our district. 'Mr. Hamer,' I said, 'will you
appoint me to West Point?' 'No, ---- is there, and has three years to
serve.' 'But suppose he should fail, will you send me?' Mr. Hamer
laughed. 'If he don't go through, no use for you to try, Uly.' 'Promise
me you will give me the chance, Mr. Hamer, anyhow.' Mr. Hamer promised.
The next day the defeated lad came home, and the congressman, laughing
at my sharpness, gave me the appointment. Now," said Grant, "it was my
mother's being without butter that made me general and president." But
he was mistaken. It was his own shrewdness to see the chance, and the
promptness to seize it, that urged him upward.

"There is nobody," says a Roman Cardinal, "whom Fortune does not visit
once in his life; but when she finds he is not ready to receive her, she
goes in at the door, and out through the window." Opportunity is coy.
The careless, the slow, the unobservant, the lazy fail to see it, or
clutch at it when it has gone. The sharp fellows detect it instantly,
and catch it when on the wing.

The utmost which can be said about the matter is, that circumstances
will, and do combine to help men at some periods of their lives, and
combine to thwart them at others. Thus much we freely admit; but there
is no fatality in these combinations, neither any such thing as "luck"
or "chance," as commonly understood. They come and go like all other
opportunities and occasions in life, and if they are seized upon and
made the most of, the man whom they benefit is fortunate; but if they
are neglected and allowed to pass by unimproved, he is unfortunate.

"Charley," says Moses H. Grinnell to a clerk born in New York City,
"take my overcoat tip to my house on Fifth Avenue." Mr. Charley takes
the coat, mutters something about "I'm not an errand boy. I came here to
learn business," and moves reluctantly. Mr. Grinnell sees it, and at the
same time one of his New England clerks says, "I'll take it up." "That
is right, do so," says Mr. G., and to himself he says, "that boy is
smart, he will work," and he gives him plenty to do. He gets promoted,
gets the confidence of business men as well as of his employers, and is
soon known as a successful man.

The youth who starts out in life determined to make the most of his eyes
and let nothing escape him which he can possibly use for his own
advancement, who keeps his ears open for every sound that can help him
on his way, who keeps his hands open that he may clutch every
opportunity, who is ever on the alert for everything which can help him
to get on in the world, who seizes every experience in life and grinds
it up into paint for his great life's picture, who keeps his heart open
that he may catch every noble impulse and everything which may inspire
him, will be sure to live a successful life; there are no ifs or ands
about it. If he has his health, nothing can keep him from success.

_Zion's Herald_ says that Isaac Rich, who gave one million and three
quarters to found Boston University of the Methodist Episcopal Church,
began business thus: at eighteen he went from Cape Cod to Boston with
three or four dollars in his possession, and looked about for something
to do, rising early, walking far, observing closely, reflecting much.
Soon he had an idea: he bought three bushels of oysters, hired a
wheelbarrow, found a piece of board, bought six small plates, six iron
forks, a three-cent pepper-box, and one or two other things. He was at
the oyster-boat buying his oysters at three o'clock in the morning,
wheeled them three miles, set up his board near a market, and began
business. He sold out his oysters as fast as he could get them, at a
good profit. In that same market he continued to deal in oysters and
fish for forty years, became king of the business, and ended by founding
a college. His success was won by industry and honesty.

"Give me a chance," says Haliburton's Stupid, "and I will show you." But
most likely he has had his chance already and neglected it.

"Well, boys," said Mr. A., a New York merchant, to his four clerks one
winter morning in 1815, "this is good news. Peace has been declared. Now
_we_ must be up and doing. We shall have our hands full, but we can do
as much as anybody."

He was owner and part owner of several ships lying dismantled during the
war, three miles up the river, which was covered with ice an inch thick.
He knew that it would be a month before the ice yielded for the season,
and that thus the merchants in other towns where the harbors were open,
would have time to be in the foreign markets before him. His decision
therefore was instantly taken.

"Reuben," he continued, addressing one of his clerks, "go and collect as
many laborers as possible to go up the river. Charles, do you find
Mr.----, the rigger, and Mr.----, the sailmaker, and tell them I want
them immediately. John, engage half-a-dozen truckmen for to-day and
to-morrow. Stephen, do you hunt up as many gravers and caulkers as you
can, and hire them to work for me." And Mr. A. himself sallied forth to
provide the necessary implements for icebreaking. Before twelve o'clock
that day, upward of an hundred men were three miles up the river,
clearing the ships and cutting away ice, which they sawed out in large
squares, and then thrust under the main mass to open up the channel. The
roofing over the ships was torn off, and the clatter of the caulkers'
mallets was like to the rattling of a hail-storm, loads of rigging were
passed up on the ice, riggers went to and fro with belt and knife,
sailmakers busily plied their needles, and the whole presented an
unusual scene of stir and activity and well-directed labor. Before night
the ships were afloat, and moved some distance down the channel; and by
the time they had reached the wharf, namely, in some eight or ten days,
their rigging and spars were aloft, their upper timbers caulked, and
everything ready for them to go to sea.

Thus Mr. A. competed on equal terms with the merchants of open seaports.
Large and quick gains rewarded his enterprise, and then his neighbors
spoke depreciatingly of his "good luck." But, as the writer from whom we
get the story says, Mr. A. was equal to his opportunity, and this was
the secret of his good fortune.

A Baltimore lady lost a valuable diamond bracelet at a ball, and
supposed it was stolen from the pocket of her cloak. Years afterward,
she walked the streets near the Peabody Institute to get money to
purchase food. She cut up an old, worn out, ragged cloak to make a hood
of, when lo! in the lining of the cloak, she discovered the diamond
bracelet. During all her poverty she was worth thirty-five hundred
dollars, but did not know it.

Many of us who think we are poor are rich in opportunities if we could
only see them, in possibilities all about us, in faculties worth more
than diamond bracelets, in power to do good.

In our large eastern cities it has been found that at least ninety-four
out of every hundred found their first fortune at home, or near at hand,
and in meeting common everyday wants. It is a sorry day for a young man
who cannot see any opportunities where he is, but thinks he can do
better somewhere else. Several Brazilian shepherds organized a party to
go to California to dig gold, and took along a handful of clear pebbles
to play checkers with on the voyage. They discovered after arriving at
Sacramento, after they had thrown most of the pebbles away, that they
were all diamonds. They returned to Brazil only to find that the mines
had been taken up by others and sold to the government.

The richest gold and silver mine in Nevada was sold for forty-two
dollars by the owner, to get money to pay his passage to other mines
where he thought he could get rich.

Professor Agassiz told the Harvard students of a farmer who owned a farm
of hundreds of acres of unprofitable woods and rocks, and concluded to
sell out and try some more remunerative business.

He studied coal measures and coal oil deposits, and experimented for a
long time. He sold his farm for two hundred dollars and went into the
oil business two hundred miles away. Only a short time afterward the man
who bought the farm discovered a great flood of coal oil, which the
farmer had ignorantly tried to drain off.

A man was once sitting in an uncomfortable chair in Boston talking with
a friend as to what he could do to help mankind. "I should think it
would be a good thing," said the friend, "to begin by getting up an
easier and cheaper chair."

"I will do it," he exclaimed, leaping up and examining the chair. He
found a great deal of rattan thrown away by the East India merchant
ships, whose cargoes were wrapped in it. He began the manufacture of
rattan chairs and other furniture, and has astonished the world by what
he has done with what was before thrown away. While this man was
dreaming about some far off success, he at that very time had fortune
awaiting only his ingenuity and industry.

If you want to get rich, study yourself and your own wants. You will
find millions of others have the same wants, the same demands. The
safest business is always connected with men's prime necessities. They
must have clothing, dwellings; they must eat. They want comforts,
facilities of all kinds, for use and pleasure, luxury, education,
culture. Any man who can supply a great want of humanity, improve any
methods which men use, supply any demand or contribute in any way to
their well-being, can make a fortune.

But it is detrimental to the highest success to undertake anything
merely because it is profitable. If the vocation does not supply a human
want, if it is not healthful, if it is degrading, if it is narrowing,
don't touch it.

A selfish vocation never pays. If it belittles the manhood, blights the
affections, dwarfs the mental life, chills the charities and shrivels
the soul, don't touch it. Choose that occupation, if possible, which
will be the most helpful to the largest number.

It is estimated that five out of every seven of the millionaire
manufacturers began by making with their own hands the articles on which
they made their fortune.

One of the greatest hindrances to advancement and promotion in life is
the lack of observation and the disinclination to take pains. A keen,
cultivated observation will see a fortune where others see only poverty.
An observing man, the eyelets of whose shoes pulled out, but who could
ill afford to get another pair, said to himself, "I will make a metallic
lacing hook, which can be riveted into the leather." He succeeded in
doing so and now he is a very rich man.

An observing barber in Newark, N. J., thought he could make an
improvement on shears for cutting hair, and invented "clippers" and
became very rich. A Maine man was called from the hayfield to wash out
the clothes for his invalid wife. He had never realized what it was to
wash before. He invented the washing-machine and made a fortune. A man
who was suffering terribly with toothache, said to himself, "There must
be some way of filling teeth to prevent them aching;" he invented gold
filling for teeth.

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