Failure

th the thinking class of people all over the country. It gave me my big chance to be heard. The message of optimism and good-will among men that it carried became so popular that I was invited to go on a country-wide speaking tour during the early part of 1920, during which I had the privilege of meeting and talking with some of the most progressive thinkers of this generation. Contact with these people went a very long way toward giving me the courage to keep on doing the good work that I had started. This tour was a liberal education, within itself, because it brought me in exceedingly close contact with people in practically all walks of life, and gave me a chance to see that the United States .of America was a pretty large country. Comes, now, a description of the climax of the seventh turning point of my life. During my speaking tour I was sitting in a restaurant in Dallas, Texas, watching the hardest downpour of rain that I have ever seen. The water was pouring down over the plate-glass window in two great streams, and playing backward and forward from one of these streams to the other were little streams, making what resembled a great ladder of water. 25 As I looked at this unusual scene, the thought flashed into my mind that I would have a splendid lecture if I organized all that I had learned from the seven turning-points of my life and all I had learned from studying the lives of successful men, and offered it under the title of the Magic Ladder to Success. On the back of an envelope I outlined the fifteen points out of which this lecture was built, and later I worked these points into a lecture that was literally built from the temporary defeats described in the seven turning-points of my life. All that I lay claim to knowing that is of value is represented by these fifteen points; and the material out of which this knowledge was gathered is nothing more or less than the knowledge that was forced upon me through experiences which have undoubtedly been classed, by some, as failures! The reading course, of which this lesson is a part, is but the sum total of that which I gathered through these failures. If this course proves to be of value to you, as I hope it will, you may give the credit to those failures described in this lesson. Perhaps you will wish to know what material, monetary benefits I have gained from these turning-points, for you probably realize that we are living in an age in which life is an irksome struggle for existence and none too pleasant for those who are cursed with poverty. All right! I'll be frank with you. To begin with, the estimated income from the sale of this course is all that I need, and this, despite the fact that I have insisted that my publishers apply the Ford philosophy and sell the course at a popular price that is within th