Failure

had not really found my place in the world. It must have been obvious to you that most, if not all, of my temporary defeats were due mainly to the fact that I had not yet discovered the work into which I could throw my heart and soul. Finding the work for which one is best fitted and which one likes best is very much like finding the one person whom one loves best; there is no rule by which to make the search, but when the right niche is contacted one immediately recognizes it. SEVENTH TURNING POINT Before I finish I will describe the collective lessons that I learned from each of the seven turning points of my life, but first let me describe the seventh and last of these turning-points. To do so, I must go back to that eventful day - November Eleven, Nineteen Hundred and Eighteen! That was Armistice Day, as everyone knows. The war bad left me without a penny, as I have already stated, but I was happy to know that the slaughter had ceased and reason was about to reclaim civilization once more. As I stood in front of my office window and looked out at the howling mob that was celebrating the end of the war, my mind went back into my yesterdays, especially to that eventful day when that kind old gentleman laid his band on my shoulder and told me that if I would acquire an education I could make my mark in the world. I had been acquiring that education without knowing it. Over a period of more than twenty years I had been going to school in the University of Hard Knocks, as you must have observed from my description of the various turning-points of my life. 17 As I stood in front of that window my entire past, with its bitter and its sweet, its ups and its downs, passed before me in review. The time had come for another turning point! I sat down to my typewriter and, to my astonishment, my hands began to play a regular tune upon the key-board. I had never written so rapidly or so easily before. I did not plan or think about that which I was writing - I just wrote that which came into my mind! Unconsciously, I was laying the foundation for the most important turning point of my life; for, when I had finished, I had prepared a document through which I financed a national magazine that gave me contact with people throughout the English-speaking world. So greatly did that document influence my own career, and the lives of tens of thousands of other people, that I believe it will be of interest to the students of this course; therefore, I am reproducing it, just as it appeared in Hill's Golden Rule magazine, where it was first published, as follows: A PERSONAL VISIT WITH YOUR EDITOR I am writing on Monday, November eleventh, 1918. Today will go down in history as the greatest holiday. On the street, just outside of my office window, the surging crowds of people are celebrating th