Success

In the graduating class before which this man spoke were thirteen boys, all of whom were so poor that they had barely enough money with which to pay their way. Some of them were paying their own way by working before and after school hours. That was twenty-five years ago.

Last summer, I met the president of the business college which these boys attended and he gave me the history of each one of them, from the time that they graduated until the time when I talked to him.

One of them is the president of one of the big wholesale drug companies, and a wealthy man; one is a successful lawyer; two own large business colleges of their own; one is a professor in the department of economics in one of the largest universities in America; one is the president of one of the large automobile manufacturing companies; two are presidents of banks, and wealthy men; one is the owner of a large department store; one is the vice-president of one of the great railway systems of the country; one is a well established Certified Public Accountant; one is dead; and the thirteenth is compiling this Reading Course on the Law of Success.

Eleven successes out of a class of thirteen boys is not a bad record, thanks to the spirit of action developed by that business college training. It is not the schooling you have had that counts; it is the extent to which you express that which you learned from your schooling through well organized and intelligently directed action.

By no means would I belittle higher education, but I would offer hope and encouragement to those who have had no such education, provided they express that which they know, be it ever so little, in intensive action, along constructive lines.

One of the greatest Presidents who ever occupied the White House had but little schooling, but he did such a good job of expressing what knowledge he acquired by that little schooling, through properly directed action, that his name has been inseparably woven into the history of the United States.

Every city, town and hamlet has its population of those well-known characters called ne'er-do-wells, and if you will analyze these unfortunate people, you will observe that one of their outstanding features is procrastination.