Chapter - 03

How To Find Your Own Gold

Where And How To Look For It

During the uninhibited days of the California gold rush, the only rule was that the gold was where you found it. The very term, "striking it rich," was indicative of the large part luck played in one's success. Of two men working the same creek within feet of each other, one could emerge a rich man and the other a pauper though both were applying the same amount of energy and talent to the job. And just to keep things interesting, lucky men are still finding gold in sizable amounts entirely by accident. Nevertheless, few are the modern mining companies that include luck as a major asset in the annual report to stockholders.

Today geology, minerology, and geo-physics are the sciences that have greatly reduced, though not entirely eliminated, the element of luck in our search for buried wealth. Aerial photographs reveal geological formations that the Forty-Niner couldn't suspect though he dug and picked his way over the terrain foot by foot. Electronic devices suspended below helicopters probe the earth like super-powered mine detectors, registering the presence of minerals far below the surface. Explosives are detonated to send shock waves into the earth, and sensitive devices record the echoing waves returned by different types of minerals and barren rock. When all of this data is patiently compiled, and then compared with the data supplied by mines of known productivity, the modern gold seeker has but to dig at the spot his scientific aids indicate as most likely.

The same principle is used by the modern navigator who uses gyro-compasses, radio compasses, Loran, Shoran, and radar to keep him safely on course through fogs that would leave helpless the navigator of only a few years ago. Man can see a port through solid fog, and make blind landings when, to use an airman's description, "even the birds are walking." He can see through solid rock, and find wealth the Forty-Niner wouldn't have recognized had he seen it on the surface. But what can he see of his own goal in life? And what does he know of the wealth contained in his own buried achievements?

Dr. Harlow Shapley, whose highly technical articles on astronomy have made him world famous, made this observation on humans during the long course of his observations of outer space: "Man has a deadly enemy at his throat, one that may succeed in returning the planet to the clams, kelp, and cockroaches. The enemy is, of course, himself. Man's worst foe is man."

What the celestial philosopher was driving at is that while man is perfectly willing to tackle the most dangerous forms of external exploration, from the explosive content of the invisible nucleus to the reaches of limitless space itself, he is extremely reluctant to face inward exploration. Wrote Dean Roy Pearson of the Andover Newton Theological School, "Whatever our fears of meeting other people, none is quite so great as our fear of meeting ourselves."

I am not going to discount the fact that this fear is real. I have seen it too often. I have also seen its cause. Almost without exception, man fears to look back at what he was. The mistakes he made are still too painful. The first look at the past produces a wince, and a deeper look produces only a deeper cut. Instinctively, like the burnt child recoiling from the hot stove, he snaps his thoughts back to the endurable present, and assures himself that it is better to "let sleeping dogs lie."

That is like saying it is better to let the fog-bound ship crash, and the modern miner sink his pick in solid rock. It is the same old tired theory that a man profits from his mistakes. If one's past contains painful mistakes, it likewise contains rewarding achievements. If the Comstock Lode was one of the most richly rewarding strikes in history, Mount Davidson on which it is located is as big a pile of barren rock as one would care to contemplate. Hundreds of men dug into it and found la borrasca—only the rock. But the Comstock is not famed for the thousands of failures. It is famed because from its wealth sprang railroads, and telegraph lines, and a substantial part of San Francisco. Who looked at a mountain of failure when the thin vein of success was what counted?

In the same way, why should you look into your past at the painful failures when it is your accomplishments that count? Merely because thousands of years teach that ships must crash in a fog doesn't make our modern navigators refuse scientific navigational aids. Merely because the search for gold was conducted for thousands of years on a hit-or-miss basis doesn't mean our modern gold-seeker must reject the scientific aids available today. And merely because the centuries teach that we must profit from our mistakes—a feat the centuries notably failed to accomplish—doesn't mean that you must work without the career development aids discovered in recent years.

No longer do you have to flounder around in a confusion of conflicting proverbs made authoritative only because they seem to have stood the test of time. Enough of those old sayings have been coined to fit almost any situation, but the same one that works for early birds is fatal for early worms, and hundreds of others can be equally treacherous when wrongly applied.
 
Not Where To Go, But How To Get There

Instead, we begin by looking into your past to become better acquainted with that unique, successful person who is yourself. This is by no means an easy task. If you are like most, you have been acting parts for so long, and adapting yourself to roles provided by changing circumstances that sometimes the roles become more real in your mind than your actual self. As Hitler's propaganda chief, Paul Goebbels, proved, a lie repeated often enough takes on the appearance of truth, and when that distortion takes place, conflict results. Not that you were lying when you adapted yourself to changing roles any more than the chameleon is lying when he changes color from place to place, but he may have some conflict in deciding what color he really is.

What we are looking for in your past are your achievements. That should be a pleasure, but immediately we encounter our old bugaboo, tradition. I know I have dwelt over-long on tradition, but you have no idea how much too long tradition has dwelt in you. A few phrases, no matter how often I repeat them, do not easily overcome beliefs so firmly planted by the centuries that they are akin to instinct. You may want to look for your achievements, but as I warned earlier, your first reaction is to shy away from anything that might make you look "conceited," or "too big for your britches." Forget it. Successful companies spend millions of dollars a year in advertising to proclaim the merits of their products, and what is good for companies is good for individuals when the claims are based on merit.

So let's get organized; an obvious suggestion leading to more complications. Recently I visited a friend who had become the chief adviser and organizer to the president of a $100,000,000 firm. On my previous visit I had found him with a desk so neatly stacked with papers that the neatness itself was awesome. "I've got everything organized in order of importance," he had assured me. "In one second I can find any paper I need."

This time, not to my complete astonishment, I found him with a clear desk, while in his hands he held one manila folder. "You were right," he admitted wryly. "Those neat piles I was so proud of were distracting. As long as they were there, they reminded me of what I had to do, and I couldn't concentrate on the one job that was urgent. So I cleared everything off the desk except the job I was working on, and I've been able to concentrate like fury ever since."

He had discovered one of the basic laws of work: The more you have to do, the more important it becomes that you concentrate on one job at a time. Work organized for successful accomplishment is work organized to direct full attention upon the job in hand, with no dissipation of energy on nagging distractions. Yet it is not quite that easy. Before my friend could select the one job for his immediate attention, he had to concentrate first on some job planning. He had to familiarize himself with the values of all the papers before he could determine the order in which they were to be tackled one by one. Steeped in company policy as he was, the job-planning offered no great difficulty.

On the other hand, how do we concentrate on the over-all job-planning of a career when we don't know what course the career might take?

The traditional "rules for success" have no answer for that question. They would have you "set a goal," and "work hard" until you get there. The logic seems sound, and many determined men have achieved "success" that way, but just as often the results can be tragic. That distant goal selected at the age of 20 can turn out to be a dead end at 40, especially if the goal was one selected as the result of well-meant advice from parents, friends, teachers or employers. And then, tradition would have you believe, it is too late to start over.
 
Assay The Ore

By this time, you should have remembered and written down many of your achievements. If not, take the time to write down ten for a start. These might be relatively unimportant experiences to anyone but you yourself.

Like gold ore, your achievements have to be "panned" in order to find the nuggets, small and large. Your achievements have to be examined, and la borrasca separated from the gold. When you have the golden information, when you know your best self and your best capabilities, you will come to know the goals you want to reach. As each goal is gained, the habit of success becomes more deeply entrenched, and constantly bigger and more enticing goals become attainable.

Now to uncover your achievements. Of course I have asked that you make a list of at least ten, but if you have already done so you are an exception. If you are like most of us, you haven't been able to locate many, if any, significant achievements, mainly because they have been blanketed under layers of modesty. Or perhaps, like many of my clients, you have procrastinated in listing your achievements in the hope that I will reveal some magic words to make your success inevitable and spare you a lot of homework. I pause to shudder at where I might be if I possessed abracadabra of such potency. The fictional Svengali hypnotizing his little Trilby to singing triumphs would be a naive innocent compared to the man who holds the key to everyone's success.

Only you hold the key to your success, and only in your achievements is it to be found. So start writing, preferably in a new notebook that will in itself signify a fresh start toward success. Start with the first achievement that comes to mind-something you enjoyed doing, and did well, which made you feel good when it was done. But it must be written down.

Do not concern yourself with listing your achievements in chronological order, or in order of importance, or, least of all, with what others may have thought of them. Though we are all different, we all share many of the same talents, as the conformists are happy to point out, neglecting, however, to mention that no two individuals are equally strong in all the same talents, nor do they have the same opinions of them. And it is in these differences of strength and opinions that one individual differs from another. Sometimes we can see talents in some people showing up so strongly that we refer to them as born salesmen, or born actors, or born artists, and then we look at ourselves where these talents are conspicuous by their absence, and wonder if we were born with anything. For the most part, when we think of people born to this field or that, we are thinking of those whose talents were clearly evident quite early in life. I know a born sales manager who, at the age of nine, had four boys working for him on his paper route. My actor friend, so mortified at making a wrong entrance, declaimed to the cows in his father's barn when he was eight. General James Gavin had read all the military books in his local library before he was twelve, and Stanley Hiller of helicopter fame was caught speeding at the age of nine—in a scooter he powered with his mother's washing machine motor.

But what of those whose talents are not so conspicuous? Of those it was customary to say that their talents "showed up late in life," or that they "came as a surprise." Not so. Their talents were just as surely present early in life as those of their more conspicuous friends. What was lacking until recently was a means of recognizing them at all ages. Now we can not only recognize them, but we can apply them to fields of opportunity that didn't even exist when these talents were first demonstrated. I am reminded here of a four-year-old boy who plagued his uncle with questions like, "Why does a nail stick to a magnet?" and "Why does a compass point to the north?" and "What is magnetism, anyway?" In 1883 these questions indicated only that the boy was a nuisance, but at the age of 43 Albert Einstein won the Nobel prize for his development of the theory of relativity.

The age at which your achievements occurred is not important. However, in selecting your achievements—your veins of gold—be sure you include experiences that brought you personal satisfaction as well as accomplishment. That others might not have recognized them as achievements is of no consequence to you. For one achievement, such as winning a spelling bee, you might have received praise and a pat on the head. For another, such as collecting a dozen different eggs of song birds, you might have been soundly punished. For another, such as mowing the lawn for an aged cripple, you might have been rewarded with both cash and gratitude. For another, such as braving yourself to go off a ski jump, you might have broken a leg, causing pain to both yourself and the family bank account when the doctor bills came due. But no matter what your friends, parents, and neighbors might have to say about these incidents, the only thing that counts is your own opinion.

In an office across the street from me in New York sits an executive who "wasted" some 25 years of his life as a successful attorney in corporation and government work. When he first came to me, complaining of being frustrated in his career, I urged him to write down his achievements. "To get the best cross-section/' I said, "list two achievements for each five-year period of your life. At forty-nine, you should be able to set down at least twenty."

He returned a week later with four. In high school he had completed the first album of what had now grown into a valuable stamp collection. In college he had set a record in selling more advertising space for the college humor magazine than any student had ever sold before. Then there was the day he celebrated passing his bar examinations. His fourth achievement was written in terse and bitter words: "The day I realized that after a quarter of a century on a sure salary, I wasn't getting anywhere."

He wasn't giving himself much to work on, but it was a start. The stamp album, for instance. He told me about it. His parents had objected to his hobby because it was confining, expensive, and a lot of nonsense adding up to nothing. They thought he should be out with the other fellows, spending his money on sodas, movies, and sports instead of stamps. His friends, or rather his classmates because he had no real friends, thought of him as a sissy, and certainly the girls found nothing of interest in a boy who could talk only of stamps. But in spite of the fact that the opinions of others condemned him to a lonesome childhood, he found in his stamp collection a release for his talents that he could find in no other way.

What talent, you might ask, as was asked then, is needed to paste a few stamps in an album? Very little talent, we can answer today, if only a few stamps are involved. Every child goes through a period of collecting a few frogs, turtles, snakes, coins, eggs, dolls, and countless other items, but if this acquisitive period is of brief duration, it is without lasting significance. The boy who collects a few butterflies is not necessarily a future lepidopterist, nor is the young coin collector destined for a place in high finance if a few coins are the extent of his collection. But when a hobby survives in the face of many obstacles, we can be sure it has the solid support of genuine talent.

Today we know that the genuine collector expresses through his collection a desire for ownership, a desire for independence, a desire to run his own business, or his own department, or conduct his own research. In real life he may work in a field far removed from that around which his collection is centered, like the jockey who collects paintings, or the financier who collects mushrooms, but when he is with his collection he is king. He has something unique, created by his talents, and his talents alone.

To return to my stamp-collector-turned-attorney, after 25 years as a corporation and government attorney, he still saw himself as the servant of others instead of the master of his own business. No longer was he looking upon his stamp collecting as a creative hobby but as a refuge in which he could escape the frustrations of daily life.
 
"Tell me what you have to do to be a good stamp collector," I suggested.

He didn't know. He hadn't thought about it. "I guess you just have to know the business," he said. Not much of an answer from one who had devoted much of his lifetime to his hobby.

"I think we've got a vein of gold here," I said, "and I don't mean in the cash value of the stamps you have collected. I know, for instance, that you have to be highly observant to be a stamp collector. You have to have a keen eye for color. You have to have an eye for detail that is practically microscopic. I know you stamp collectors can concentrate more intently on one square inch of stamp than can an art connoisseur on the Mona Lisa. You appreciate design. You are somewhat familiar with foreign countries. These are just the surface indications we all know about. As the expert in your field, you should be able to dig deeper. Suppose you write down a list of the talents you think a stamp collector needs, and why. While you're at it, you might as well write an explanation of how you were able to sell more advertising space for your college magazine than anyone else."

He did not find it easy to mine his own veins of gold, but no one has ever accused mining of any kind of being easy. We do have one big advantage, however, over the hard-luck miner. He must deal with matter, and no amount of mind-over-matter is going to bring two widely separated veins of ore together. But such is the human mind that we can combine two widely separated talents to produce a single vein of double richness. When several talents can be combined, the rewards can enrich all phases of your life, and mind truly has triumphed over matter.

In the case of my friend, he began by first recognizing that his stamp collection was no mere hobby but a release for a wide variety of talents. He found it harder to realize, after his years as a career lawyer, "taking the legal chores tossed my way," that his carefully nurtured collection was an expression of his deep, inner desire to be his own boss. Then, in analyzing his success as a space salesman for his college magazine, he found himself writing, "In the advertising department, I was what you might call the star. No one had to tell me where to go to solicit advertising." And as his own boss, he had set a record. No one was more astonished by this admission than he was. Like most people, he had never looked back at his achievement to determine some of its causes. Nor had he ever looked at it in terms of gold it might contain.

He had more difficulty in explaining why he considered passing his bar examination an achievement. Finally he wrote, "My parents had always wanted me to be a lawyer. I took pride in being able to please them." No one knows how many careers are ruined or handicapped when a dutiful child follows the dictates of his parents' ambitions instead of his own, but the number is horrendous. In this case, all was not lost. For all that my friend claimed to have been completely frustrated by his years as an attorney, a little deep self-examination revealed many accomplishments in which he could take pride. In the legal conflicts that crop up between men, and between corporations, and between governments, he had found great satisfaction in his ability to reconcile differences of opinion out of court. Under a little more self-examination, he was ready to admit that settling a case out of court involved a considerable amount of diplomacy along with abilities to arbitrate and negotiate, "but that sounds pretty conceited.”

You see, he was still using the traditional word, "conceit," to slap down a realistic appraisal of his values. But at least he was beginning to feel "conceited" instead of "frustrated," and that indicated a healthy change of attitude. The next step was to combine these widely separated achievements into a single rich vein of ore. How he made that step will be revealed in the succeeding chapters, but by way of immediate encouragement, here is the result:

He is the head of his own department in charge of foreign and domestic sales. Through his artistic abilities and attention to details, he has been able to dress up his products, bring about improved performance, increase the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, and "build up the little fellow." Thanks to his legal training, the stringent laws governing international commerce that his competitors find so baffling offer him no difficulties. And his diplomatic ability to arbitrate and negotiate has kept his company on top in countries too often influenced by British, West German, Russian, or Japanese salesmen. He is mining all of his achievements to be a salesman of U. S. good will and his company's products. His one complaint:

"My wife and I are having so much fun on this job that I haven't been able to work on my stamp collection for months."
What I would like to make clear at this point is that the only advice he took in reaching his present position was his own. It is true that we had met at weekly intervals, but the only suggestions he needed were those offered you in these pages. I was the sounding board against which he bounced his own thoughts. The echoes returned to him, though amplified by my experience with thousands of others confronted by similar problems, were still his own words. Hence the reason for this book. These pages will provide a modern sounding board against which your own thinking will be reflected, and the words guiding you to success will be your own. In short, you will be like the modern navigator who sends out his radar signals, and reads the amplified echoes in his scope, or the modern miner who sends out his signals, and reads the amplified echoes in his detectors. The exciting difference here is that while the navigator is using his modern aid to probe space, and the miner to probe the earth, you will be probing for the right course to the rewarding ores within yourself.

The experience will seem a little strange at first, like the first time you heard a true recording of your voice, but don't let it bother you. Several of the best actors in Hollywood still squirm in anguish when they see rushes of their day's acting on the screen. Nevertheless, they persist, knowing that only through analyzing their best achievements can they continue to improve. For you, the next chapter will ease the way.

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