Excerpt from The Genius of Industry, or How Work Wins and Manhood Grows

Flying at our mast-head is this motto success A slow growth. The introduction to the problem we have before us relates itself to Time. This is a factor which to despise is to ruin our work in its very inception. He who would command enduring success must spend long, weary years either in careful preparation or arduous struggle. More men fail in life for lack of persistent effort than for lack of genius.

It is an established fact that the majority of those young men who start in life under the most favorable auspices fail of making their mark. The very character of success is such that it tends to paralyze their efforts. Success to an experienced man kindles perseverance, blowing energy to a white heat. But the novice, crowned with a few glories, finds in them a siren that lulls to sleep all his energies. It leads him into the delusion that he was born under a lucky star, and therefore the gods will care for him. Although we Americans boast so greatly about our individuality, and reject positively the doctrine of fatalism, down deep in the heart there lurks a shadowy but potent impression that it is better to be born lucky than rich. There never was a greater fallacy. Luck is the prize of him who takes it.

The word is the euphuism of the weak to excuse their weakness.

Early achievements in business, in literature, or on the forum, certainly tell of unusual powers, and if the physical and mental organizations are well balanced and well pre served, we may pretty safely prophesy of things yet to come. John Quincy Adams, when seven years old, was called into the presence of the family, where he delivered a speech creditable to a lad of fourteen. You may call this precocity. But if so, it was attended by growth. Nor did he ever stop growth. Having won the title of Old Man Equent, he died at an advanced age on the floor of Congress. Bonaparte, at school, on the field where the students had their snow forts, was the miniature of the general who led the phalanxes of France with success against the five coalitions of Austria. William Cullen Bryant, at the age of nineteen, wrote Thanatopsis, a poem admired and quoted wherever literature is loved. After scattering immortal gems along his path for sixty-six years, at the age of eighty-two he sent forth the Flood of Years, which for lofty imagery and superb diction has been excelled by no one, and rarely equaled by himself. Yet in the face of these illustrious examples of bright youth and stalwart age, it is a fact that the majority of brilliant young men soon fail, and are heard of no more.

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