Three Feet to Gold

Posted on November 06, 2012 by Sumom Geevarughese, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

“A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success.” Elbert Hubbard

In Napoleon Hill’s book “Think and Grow Rich”, he tells the tale of “three feet from gold.” The story is about a man who found land that supposedly had gold deposits. Relatives and friends helped him raise the money to buy a machine to mine the land. Several weeks later, he found some gold deposits but then it went dry. After several attempts to find more gold, he and his colleagues gave up.

He eventually sold the machine to a junk man for very little. The junk man hired an engineer who showed that the first man had given up just “three feet away from gold”. Had he continued on, he would have made millions but instead his millions went to the junk man.

Too often you give up on a relationship, friend, diet, school, career or new skill because…

· it is too hard

· the results are not immediate enough

· you have one setback or face rejection

· someone tells you that you’ll never succeed or are not good enough

Will you stop “three feet away” from your next big accomplishment? In building my coaching practice, I faced rejection, sometimes even from the same customer repeatedly. I knew I had to stay persistent and got proof of this when the same customer finally said “YES” on my 5th pitch. Little did she realize that I had been contemplating giving up and writing her off as “Little to No Probability or Potential”. Had I not made that last pitch, I would have lost the opportunity to hold a workshop and missed the clients from the workshop that later signed up for individual coaching.

What are you considering giving up on?

· Is the job that you’ve been at for years that has you feeling defeated?

· Are you at a new job or have a new boss that has broken promises of a promotion or increased responsibility or staff?

· Has your spouse disappointed you, yet again, in picking up some of the family planning?

· Frustrated with falling off the diet wagon again and ready to just accept being overweight?

· Housing market got you feeling hopeless because you can’t upsize even though you need more room as your family grows bigger.

When you consider giving up, you have pretty much come to the conclusion that there is no hope or you lack the optimism that you will succeed. I challenge you now when contemplating what your next move should be, reflect on a question once posed by Church minister Robert Schuller. The quote is “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?”

If you thought this way, what would be your next move?

· For the job that you’ve been at for years, do you seek out other opportunities at your company or even propose to your boss creating a new position to fill a need?

· If it’s the new boss that has disappointed you, can you have the conversation explaining your expectations and prove your market value? Why not propose a 90 day challenge where you will prove your value on an assignment and if at the end, you succeed, he must honor his promise?

· When you find your spouse unreliable, would you consider reassigning responsibilities to fit those that match his strengths? Set him up for success instead of failure and support his efforts with praise.

· Get on a new diet wagon by evaluating what is missing from what you’ve tried before. Is it support, one-on-one counseling, planning your meals, making time for exercise? Identify exactly where you fall and get help to prevent it from happening again.

· While you’d rather sell your current home and buy a new one, is renting your current home a possibility that you should consider?

· Does it make sense to remodel your current home to make it more livable for your bigger family and increase the value for a later sale?

Don’t let “three feet” keep you from your next gold mine.

“When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on”. ~Franklin D. Roosevelt