Napoleon Hill

1 THE LAW OF SUCCESS Teaching, for the First Time in the History of the World, the True Philosophy upon which all Personal Success is Built. BY NAPOLEON HILL 1928 PUBLISHED BY The RALSTON UNIVERSITY PRESS MERIDEN, CONN. Included as part of the Happiness Library from http://www.coachingtohappiness.com 2 THE LAW OF SUCCESS Lesson Fourteen - FAILURE Yesterday is but a dream, Tomorrow is only a vision. But today well lived makes Every yesterday a dream of happiness, And every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this day. The Sanskrit. "You Can Do It if You Believe You Can! UNDER ordinary circumstances the term failure is a negative term. In this lesson, the word will be given a new meaning, because the word bas been a very much misused one; and, for that reason, it has brought unnecessary grief and hardship to millions of people. In the outset, let us distinguish between failure and temporary defeat. Let us see if that which is so often looked upon as failure is not, in reality, but temporary defeat. Moreover, let us see if this temporary defeat is not usually a blessing in disguise, for the reason that it brings us up with a jerk and redirects our energies along different and more desirable lines. In Lesson Nine of this course, we learned that strength grows out of resistance; and we shall learn, in this lesson, that sound character is usually the handiwork of reverses, and set-backs, and temporary defeat, which the uninformed part of the world calls failure. 3 Neither temporary defeat nor adversity amounts to failure in the mind of the person who looks upon it as a teacher that will teach some needed lesson. As a matter of fact, there is a great and lasting lesson in every reverse, and in every defeat; and, usually, it is a lesson that could he learned in no other way than through defeat. Defeat often talks to us in a dumb language that we do not understand. If this were not true, we would not make the same mistakes over and over again without profiting by the lessons that they might teach us. If it were not true, we would observe more closely the mistakes, which other people make and profit by them. The main object of this lesson is to help the student understand and profit by this dumb language in which defeat talks to us. Perhaps I can best help you to interpret the meaning of defeat by taking you back over some of my own experiences covering a period of approximately thirty years. Within this period, I have come to the turning-point, which the uninformed call failure, seven different times. At each of these seven turning-points I thought I had made a dismal failure; hut now I know that what looked to be a failure was nothing more than a kindly, unseen hand, that halted me in my chosen course and with great wisdom forced me to redirect my e