Power Tool: Giving Up vs. Persevering

A Coaching Power Tool created by Jackeline Cobian
(Marketing Coaching, PERU)

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

Confucius

Reading

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Three Feet From Gold

“An uncle of R U Darby was caught by the Gold Fever in the gold rush – days, and went west to Dig and Grow Rich. He had never heard that more gold had been mined from the brains of men than has ever been taken from the earth. He staked a claim and went to work with pick and shovel. The going was hard, but his lust for gold was definite.

After weeks of labour, he was rewarded by the discovery of the shining ore. He needed machinery to bring the ore to the surface. Quietly, he covered up the mine, retraced his footsteps to his home in Williamsburg, Maryland, and told his relatives and a few neighbours of the strike. They got together money for the needed machinery, had it shipped. The uncle and Darby went back to work the mine.

 The first car of ore was mined, and shipped to smelter. The returns showed they had one of the richest mines in Colorado! A few more cars of that ore would clear the debts. Then would come the big killing in profits. Down went the drills. Up went the hopes of Darby and uncle. Then something happened. The vein of gold ore disappeared. They had come to the end of the rainbow, and the pot of gold was no longer there. They drilled on, desperately trying to pick up the vein again – all to no avail.

Finally they decided to QUIT.

They sold the machinery to a junk man for a few hundred dollars, and took the train back home. Some junk men are dumb, but not this one. He called in a mining engineer to look at the mine and do a little calculating. The engineer advised that the project had failed, because the owners were not familiar with fault lines. His calculations showed that the vein would be found Just Three Feet From Where The Darby’s Had Stopped Drilling. That is exactly where it was found

The Junk man took millions of dollars in ore from the mine, because he knew enough to seek counsel before giving up.

Most of the money, which went into the machinery, was procured through the efforts of R U Darby who was then a very young man. The money came from his relatives and neighbors, because of their faith in him. He paid back every dollar of it, although he was years in doing so.

Long afterwards, Mr. Darby recouped this loss many times over, when he made the discovery that desire can be transmuted into gold. The discovery came after he went into the business of selling life insurance.

Remembering that he lost a huge fortune, because he stopped three feet from gold, Darby profited by the experience in his chosen work, by the simple method of saying to himself,” I stopped three feet from gold, but I will never stop because men say no when I ask them to buy insurance.”

Darby is one of a small group of fewer than fifty men who sell more than a million dollars in life insurance annually. He owes his stickability to the lesson he learned from his quitability in the gold mining”.

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Perseverance is a quality that we must possess in order to obtain our goals. For whatever goal that we have, it is important that we take an effort to deeply persevere. To persevere, we must positively believe in ourselves and that must keep on moving towards the thing that we wanted. It may take hours, days, weeks, months or even years until we finally fulfill our dreams or goals. “But after that, does the long wait still matter?”Overwhelmed with success, we can barely acknowledge all the hardships that were on our way. We will be reminded with how we persevered in order to meet our goals