What You Can Do with Your Will Power

Russell H. Conwell

• Publisher: Youcanprint
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9788831628365
• Topic: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Subtopic: Persönlicher Erfolg

A "success" address which may prove inspiring to the youthful mind. Advises an early decision on a wise, definite aim in life, and cites many examples of men and women who have conquered themselves and attained success by exercising will power in the face of great obstacles.

WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH YOUR WILL POWER

by

RUSSELL H. CONWELL

First digital edition 2019 by Maria Ruggieri

PREFACE

Other writers have fully and accurately described the road, and my only hope is that these hastily written lines will inspire the young man or young woman to arise and go.

RUSSELL H. CONWELL

I. SUCCESS HAS NO SECRET

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 top if 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. Today he is a respected professor of zoology in an Ohio college.

Such illustrations I could multiply indefinitely. Of all the boys whom I have tried to help through college I cannot think of a single one who has failed for any other reason than ill health. But of course, I have never helped anyone who was not first helping himself. As soon as a man determines the goal toward which he is marching, he is in a strategic position to see and seize everything that will contribute toward that end.

Whenever a young man tells me that if he “had his way” he would be a lawyer, or an engineer, or what not, I always reply:

“You can be what you will, provided that it is something the world will be demanding ten years hence.”

This brings to my mind a certain stipulation which the ambition of youth must recognize. You must invest yourself or your money in a known demand. You must select an occupation that is fitted to your own special genius and to some actual want of the people. Choose as early as possible what your life-work will be. Then you can be continually equipping yourself by reading and observing to a purpose. There are many things which the average boy or girl learns in school that could be learned outside just as well.

Almost any man should be able to become wealthy in this land of opulent opportunity. There are some people who think that to be pious they must be very poor and very dirty. They are wrong. Not money, but the love of money, is the root of all evil. Money in itself is a dynamic force for helping humanity.

In my lectures, I have borne heavily on the fact that we are all walking over acres of diamonds and mines of gold. There are people who think that their fortune lies in some far country. It is much more likely to lie right in their own back yards or on their front door-step, hidden from their unseeing eye. Most of our millionaires discovered their fortunes by simply looking around them.

Recently I have been investigating the lives of four thousand and forty-three American millionaires. All but twenty of them started life as poor boys, and all but forty of them have contributed largely to their communities, and divided fairly with their employees as they went along. But, alas, not one rich man’s son out of seventeen dies rich.

But if a man has dilly-dallied through a certain space of wasted years, can he then develop the character, the motor force, to drive him to success? Why, my friend, will power cannot only be developed, but it is often dry powder which needs only a match. Very frequently I think of the life of Abraham Lincoln that wonderful man! and I am thankful that I was permitted to meet him. Yet Abraham Lincoln developed the splendid sinews of his will after he was twenty-one. Before that he was just a roving, good-natured sort of a chap. Always have I regretted that I failed to ask him what special circumstance broke the chrysalis of his life and loosened the wings of his will.

Many years ago, some of the students of Temple University held a meeting in a building opposite the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. As they were leaving the building they noticed a foreigner selling peanuts on the opposite curb. While buying peanuts, they got to talking with the fellow, and told him that anyone could obtain an education if he was willing to work for it. Eagerly the poor fellow drank up all the information he could get. He enrolled at Temple University and worked his way through, starting with the elementary studies. He is to-day an eminent practicing physician in the national capital.

Often, I think of an office clerk who reached a decision that the ambitions which were stirring in his soul could be realized if he could only get an education. He attended our evening classes and was graduated with a B.S. degree. He is now the millionaire head of one of the largest brokerage houses in the country.

“Where there’s a will there’s a way!” But one needs to use a little common sense about selecting the way. A general may determine to win a victory, but if he hurls his troops across an open field straight into the leaden sweep of the enemy’s artillery he invites disaster and defeat. The best general lays his plans carefully, and advances his troops in the way that will best conserve their strength and numbers. So must a man plan his campaign of life.

No man has a right, either for himself or for others, to be at work in a factory, or a store, or anywhere else, unless he would work there from choice, money or no money, if he had the necessities of life.

“As a man thinks, so he is,” says the writer of Proverbs; but as a man adjusts himself, so really is he, after all. One great trouble with many individuals is that they are made up of all sorts of machinery that is not adjusted, that is out of place, no belts on the wheels, no fire under the boiler, hence no steam to move the mechanism.

Some folk never take the trouble to size themselves up to find out what they are fitted to do and then wonder why they remain way down at the bottom of the heap. I remember a young woman who told me that she did not believe she could ever be of any particular use in the world. I mentioned a dozen things that she ought to be able to do.

“If you only knew yourself,” I said, “you would set yourself to writing. You ought to be an author.”

She shook her head and smiled, as if she thought I was making fun of her. Later, force of circumstances drove her to take up the pen. And when she came to me and told me that she was making three thousand dollars a year in literary work, and was soon to go higher, I thought back to the time when she was a poor girl making three dollars a week when she failed accurately to estimate herself.

II. THERE IS A DEPLORABLE TENDENCY

There is a deplorable tendency among many people to wait for a particularly favorable opportunity to declare themselves in the battle of life. Some people pause for the rap of opportunity when opportunity has been playing a tattoo on their resonant skulls for years.

Hardly a single great invention has been placed on the market without a number of men putting forth the claim that they had the idea first and in most cases, they proved the fact. But while they were sitting down and dreaming, or trying to bring the device to a greater perfection, a man with initiative rose up and acted. The telegraph, telephone, sewing-machine, air-brake, mowing-machine, wireless, and linotype-machine are only a few illustrations.

The most wonderful idea is quite valueless until it is put into practical operation. The Government rewards the man who first gets a patent or first puts his invention into practical use and the world does likewise. Thus, the dreamer must always lag behind the door.

True will power also predicates concentration. I shall never forget the time I went to see President Lincoln to ask him to spare the life of one of my soldiers who was sentenced to be shot. As I walked toward the door of his office I felt a greater fear than I had ever known when the shells were bursting all about us at Antietam. Finally, I mustered up courage to knock on the door. I heard a voice inside yell:

“Come in and sit down!”

The man at the table did not look up as I entered; he was busy over a bunch of papers. I sat down at the edge of a chair and wished I were in Peking or Patagonia. He never looked up until he had quite finished with the papers. Then he turned to me and said:

“I am a very busy man and have only a few minutes to spare. Tell me in the fewest words what it is you want.”

As soon as I mentioned the case he said:

“I have heard all about it, and you do not need to tell me anymore. Mr. Stanton was talking to me about that only a few days ago. You can go to the hotel and rest assured that the President never did sign an order to shoot a boy under twenty, and never will. You may tell his mother that.” Then, after a short conversation, he took hold of another bunch of papers and said, decidedly, “Good morning!”

Lincoln, one of the greatest men of the world, owed his success largely to one rule: whatsoever he had to do at all he put his whole mind into, and held it all there until the task was all done. That makes men great almost anywhere.

Too many people are satisfied if they have done a thing “well enough.” That is a fatal complacency. “Well enough” has cursed souls. “Well enough” has wrecked enterprises. “Well enough” has destroyed nations. If perfection in a task can possibly be reached, nothing short of perfection is “well enough.” Governor Talbot of Massachusetts got his high office because General Swift made a happy application of the truth in saying to the convention, “I nominate for Governor of this state a man who, when he was a farmer’s boy, hoed to the end of the row.” That saying became a campaign slogan all up and down the state. “He hoed to the end of the row! He hoed to the end of the row!” When the people discovered that this was one of the characteristics of the man, they elected him by one of the greatest majorities ever given a Governor in Massachusetts.

Yet we must bear in mind that there is such a thing as overdoing anything. Young people should draw a line between study that secures wisdom and study that breaks down the mind; between exercise that is healthful and exercise that is injurious; between a conscientiousness that is pure and divine and a conscientiousness that is over-morbid and insane; between economy that is careful and economy that is stingy; between industry that is a reasonable use of their powers and industry that is an over-use of their powers, leading only to destruction.

The best ordered mind is one that can grasp the problems that gather around a man constantly and work them out to a logical conclusion; that sees quickly what anything means, whether it be an exhibition of goods, a juxtaposition of events, or the suggestions of literature.

A man is made up largely of his daily observations. School training serves to fit and discipline him so that he may read rightly the lesson of the things he sees around him. Men have made mighty fortunes by just using their eyes.

Several years ago, I took dinner in New York with one of the great millionaires of that city. In the course of our talk he told me something about his boyhood days, how, with hardly a penny in his pocket, he slung a pack on his back and set out along the Erie Canal, looking for a job. At last he got one. He was paid three dollars a week to make soft soap for the laborers to use at the locks in washing their hands. One can hardly imagine a humbler occupation; but this boy kept his eyes open. He saw the disadvantages of soft soap, and set to work to make a hard substitute for it. Finally, he succeeded, and his success brought him many, many millions.

Every person is designed for a definite work in life, fitted for a particular sphere. Before God he has a right to that sphere. If you are an excellent housekeeper you should not be running a loom, and it is your duty to prepare yourself to enter at the first opportunity the sphere for which you are fitted.

George W. Childs, who owned the Philadelphia Ledger, once blacked boots and sold newspapers in front of the Ledger building. He told me how he used to look at that building and declare over and over to himself that someday he would own the great newspaper establishment that it housed. When he mentioned his ambition to his associates they laughed at him. But Childs had indomitable grit, and ultimately, he did come to own that newspaper establishment, one of the finest in the country.

Another thing very necessary to the pursuit of success is the proper employment of waiting moments. How do you use your waiting time for meals, for trains, for business? I suppose that if the average individual were to employ wisely these intervals in which he whistles and twiddles his thumbs he would soon accumulate enough knowledge to quite make over his life.

I went through the United States Senate in 1867 and asked each of the members how he got his early education. I found that an extremely large percentage of them had simply properly applied their waiting moments. Even Charles Sumner, a university graduate, told me that he learned more from the books he read outside of college than from those he had studied within. General Burnside, who was then a Senator, said that he had always had a book beside him in the shop where he worked.

Before leaving the subject of the power of the will, there is one thing I would like to say: a true will must have a decent regard for the happiness of others. Do not get so wrapped up in your own mission that you forget to be kind to other people, for you have not fulfilled every duty unless you have fulfilled the duty of being pleasant. Enemies and ignorance are the two most expensive things in a man’s life. I never make unnecessary enemies, they cost too much.

Everyone has within himself the tools necessary to carve out success. Consecrate yourself to some definite mission in life, and let it be a mission that will benefit the world as well as yourself. Remember that nothing can withstand the sweep of a determined will unless it happens to be another will equally as determined. Keep clean, fight hard, pick your openings judiciously, and have your eyes forever fixed on the heights toward which you are headed. If there be any other formula for success, I do not know it.

III. THE BIOGRAPHY OF THAT GREAT PATRIOT

The biography of that great patriot and statesman, Daniel Manin of Venice, Italy, contains a very romantic example of the possibilities of will force. He was born in a poor quarter of the city; his parents were without rank or money. Venice in 1805 was under the Austrian rule and was sharply divided into aristocratic and peasant classes. He was soon deserted by his f...