“Every adversity, every failure, every heartbreak, carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit." ~ Napoleon Hill
In the classic ‘Think and Grow Rich’, Napoleon Hill tells the true story of a young man who, during the gold rush era in America, had invested a great deal of time and money on a gold mine in Colorado. After some initial success, he had not hit gold for some time and became disheartened. He decided to quit and sell his equipment to a “junk man” for a few hundred dollars. The junk man opted to keep working the mine and sought counsel from a mining engineer who advised him that if he kept digging, he would strike gold just three feet from where the previous man had stopped. And sure enough, he was right – the junk man found the gold and became very rich.
The first miner was literally just three feet from gold when he quit.
This story serves as a powerful metaphor for what so many people experience when they’re making a significant change in their life. It is often the last ‘three feet’ of that process that is the hardest – the point at which they are farthest from their comfort zone and facing their self-limiting beliefs head on. This is the moment of most risk, because it often requires an act of pure faith to push on and reach that gold.
At the Grilled Cheese Coaching Co. we are privileged to have the opportunity to work with people all over the world who have bravely chosen to make important changes in their lives. As well as being a partner in the process of unlocking their potential, we will often play the role of the mining engineer from the story, reassuring them, when the going inevitably gets tough, that they are just three feet from gold.
This week’s inquiry…
What is the “gold” you are working towards?
Dive Deeper…
Leaping off buildings wasn’t exactly something graduate student Yubing Zhang ever thought she’d do. But pushing beyond her comfort zone and taking that bungee cord leap taught her more than she ever could have imagined.
“Are you ready to take the leap?”
Think and Grow Rich has been called the “Granddaddy of All Motivational Literature.” In the original, published in 1937 at the tail end of the Great Depression, Hill draws on stories of Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and other millionaires of his generation to illustrate his principles. In this updated version, Arthur R. Pell, Ph.D. draws on more contemporary examples, and also removes outmoded or arcane terminology and examples to “preclude any stumbling blocks to a new generation of readers.”
