SUCCESS

Whoso has achieved the purpose or has obtained the thing that he desires has attained Success.

There be wise ones who say that success has been cornered and monopolized and opportunities are slendering. There are still others who assure us that they have a formula; that the “greedy rich” have not the monopoly that envy attributes to them. There be socialists, anarchists, disciples of Henry George, of John Alexander Dowie, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who have prescriptions warranted to transplant one from Rag Alley to the desirable side of Easy Street. When you get through taking their nostrums step around to the fool’s office and let her enlighten you.

Success is within you, I say. The attainment of your ideal is success; if not, then what is? Blame no one (even yourself) if you fail in the realization of your ideal. You get what you want if you want it.

I do not pretend to have a hard-and-fast definition of success, that can be photographed and sent on application for inspection and approval.

“He has made a success who has obtained the fulfillment of his strongest desire.”

Do not permit the supernally wise to dissuade you by interposing some other interpretation of success. Neither heed the successful man’s advice, for unless you fail he cannot succeed, hence his advice is for his and not your success. Take a fool’s advice and shun those who would dazzle you with a description that does not apply to an achievement of the real thing which you most desire.

Why should you delude yourself with chasing after something you don’t want, because a sage has told you that it is that which you ought to want? Your own ideal is clear enough. You do not require the medicine men of your tribe to concoct ideals for you. You have a multitudinous stock of desires on hand. Make your selection. Set the chosen one on a pinnacle and have no other gods before it.

Fame, wealth, happiness, revenge, notoriety, or any other ideal that you set up in the holiest sanctuary, is yours if you prove faithful to it.

Whatever your desire is you shall have. But you must not seek to dictate by what processes it will answer your call. You must be prepared to take it by whatever route it arrives.

The price that has always been paid (there are no deadheads on the roster) is the submergence of every aim but the achievement of the ideal. You cannot serve two masters; you cannot have two ideals. The cost is marked in plain figures; it is fixed and invariable. There are no rebates, no free-list, no slipping under the canvas. If you want a thing you must strip yourself of all other purposes than that of obtaining that thing. You must conquer every craving, kill every desire, stifle every call, but the clamor of “get there!”

All that is dear to you must be held in readiness to be given in exchange. The love of parents and children, your compassion with the widowed and the fatherless, your virtue and comfort, and all else that you have held dear must be sacrificed on the altar of your ideal. There must be no looking back, lest you become a pillar of salt. However, if it is what you most desire you will not count the cost too great. If you falter at the cost, if you find there is something you won’t give in payment for your ideal, you have been mistaken in your ideal; that something which you hold back is your ideal.

You have heard your dearest friend say that she would give anything to be rid of her bad temper. She thinks amiability is her ideal. But you will discover that she has not selected her strongest ideal with discrimination, for she is not ready to give everything for her ideal of a good temper. She is willing to give everything except her bad temper. She is not willing to pay the price. Then why should she be favored? Why should a law be violated in her especial behalf by giving her something she don’t want? Her bad temper is her ideal. You are convinced that you must obey the laws of symmetry, gravity, and proportion in construction. You get tools and instruments to make sure that you may not go astray; even in making mud pies you observe the mud law. Then why should you think that you can get a free pass to success?

The price of success is all, even life! To give one’s life for one’s ideal is a privilege which only the earnest seeker of the ideal may enjoy.

Life means death anyway. Then why should you waste it on anything except in the payment for success? Whosoever makes his life serve his ideal, saves it in giving. To give your life for your ideal means that you have not lived in vain; that your life has been sold in the best market and the highest price has been realized. To die for one’s ideal means to be born again.

Examine the successful, and note how true they have been to their god. Observe W-rr-n Spr-ng-r, he is in nowise distressed because ramshackle old buildings and decrepit second-hand elevators contribute to his ideal. Nor do the McC-rm-cks permit any twinges because labor troubles lead to the killing of a few men and the hanging of anarchists. The occasional burning of an oil well are not episodes of a disturbance to the R-ck-f-ll-r ideal.

Consult not the heart when you are on the success path. (Except when your ideal is happiness, you will find no happiness outside of your heart.)

“Mine and Thine” is an intellectual philosophy. The heart has nothing to do with it. The heart says Give and the mind says Get. Get success, is an intellectual proposition. This probably explains the reasons of the different degrees of success. It appears that W-rr-n Spr-ng-r’s mental equipment is inferior to the R-ck-f-ll-rs and the McC-rm-ck thought magazine.

Know also, that you must have an earnest conviction that the thing you lust for is a primary object. My fool formula will not work in a confusion of secondaries. See to it that you have not given the highest seat in the synagogue to a mere adjunct. Be sure that the thing you want is desired for itself, and not as a means of securing some other end, else there will be the disappointment of getting the thing you thought in your mind you wanted, rather than the real thing for which the heart lusted.

One estimable old friend assured me that he wanted a million or two. “Not for myself,” he insisted, “but that I may give it to the suffering poor.”

“Then,” said I, “it will be quite the same if I were to get the million and distribute it in accordance with your schedule.” But it wasn’t the same at all. He wanted to be a benefactor. Not a blameworthy ideal, but quite different from what he thought until the test was applied.

No matter what your desires may be, the satisfaction of them depends on other people. Hence you must be circumspect in the selection of those you use; you must see that none of them have any survival of heart. If you have not sufficient intellect of your own to guide you, do not despair. Let that be the least of your troubles. There are many who are eager to render the sort of service you require. But see that the intellect you enlist is simon-pure, and then let the substitute be your guide. Obey orders without straying from the path. If you play your part well your intellectual bankruptcy will not be detected. Woe to you if you are not true to the intellectual manager! Society will condone anything if intellect stands guard to set you right, but intellectual insolvency is never forgiven.

Remember, it is sometimes wise to appear foolish; do not indulge in asking questions—for often there are no answers. And sometimes it is necessary to back up to get a better start.

It is essential to have public approval while we are on the success path. It is indispensable! It is so easy to secure the approbation of the public that one is not justified in attempts to defy public opinion unless your ideal be love of justice. In such case public opinion be hanged! Public opinion for revenge will hang you, but your ideals will survive the gallows and the cross. Public opinion can be molded by the press. Arson will be condoned if there is a spice of adventure in burning down a distillery, or blowing up an oil well, to say nothing of wrecking banks and corporations. Robbery by rebates and other discriminations presents no difficulties; and murder, if we can procure it by the militia or the hangman, is respectable. These diversions are incidents of success, and comport with the ideal in whose service they are enlisted.

You will have to join the Combine of Modern Saints. A gift now and then to a hospital, church, or libraries and social settlements when in season, also have their appointed time; and occasionally art is quite the vogue.

The people will give you anything you want if you’ll but ask in the right way. They care not if you kill some of them, or rob them all, but do it beautifully. They will prove loyal if your rapacities are cloaked with “Law and Order” and your misdemeanors tagged “virtue.” They will let you denude them if you accomplish it in the name of civilization.

Be true to the esprit de corps of success. No man can be successful enough to stand alone. Only the success of failure can indulge that luxury. And above all, avoid any tendency to being natural. You will fail if you allow love any play. Nevertheless, at times you are expected to manifest symptoms of love. This entails the necessity of becoming an imitator. A good article of make-believe will be effective as the genuine in the atmosphere in which your lot is cast. The moment you yield to love you have failed; success will tolerate but one God.

Let me repeat: If you be an earnest seeker for success, your heart must be dead and the whole campaign shifted to the intellect. That, too, is dead, but the intellect being wise is too wise to know of the deadness of its death. It continues in galvanic imitation of life. One Chicago millionaire has been dead for forty years, but so excellently galvanized is he, that the administration on his estate is postponed from day to day. When seen in his automobile only last week he had a very natural, life-like look in his eyes, but the death grip on his wallet emitted the odors of the tomb.

This essay is not written for the benefit of the wise in order to convince them of the efficacy of changing their ideal. They will not accept my foolishness any more than I will bow down before their wisdom. It is the ideal of the wise to establish ideals for others. Let them air their wisdom. They, too, have a province in this world of many mansions. I do not begrudge them the space they cumber, nor do I commiserate the victims of their wisdom. Not that it is my ideal to decry the wondrous wise! That is a bit of en passant by-play with which I amuse myself while resting for intervals in the pursuit of my central ideal.