Success (Second Edition)

d Health. They point out that I have omitted one vital factor-Luck. So widespread is this belief, largely pagan in its ori

ving much of this discrepancy in fortune. Again, a disaster which destroys a single individual may alter the whole course of a survivor's career. But the devotees of the Goddess of Luck do not mean this at all. They hold that some men are born lucky and others unlucky, a

cing against his rival-but who goes to the tables at Monte Carlo backing runs of good or ill luck. It has been defined

always beat the individual if he stays long enough. I presume that the bank there is managed honestly, although I neither know nor care whether it is. But this at least is certain-the cagnotte gains 3 per cent. on every spin. Mathematically, a man is bound to lose

ortunes made at Monte Carlo. The proprietors there under

ver have played a stake. And from the point of view of real success in affairs the gambler is doomed in advance. It is a frame of mind which a man should

e lucky recipient with her pinions of gold dazzles the mind of youth. Men think that

the goddess has proved adverse. There is a third form of this mental disease. A young man spoke to me in Monte Carlo the other day, and said, "I could do anything

enough for him. He expects that Luck will suddenly bestow on him a ready-made position or a gorgeous chance suitable to the high opinions he holds of h

cellor if a big brief had ever come their way. They develop that terrible disease known as "the genius of the untried." Their case is almost as pitiful or ludicrous as that of the man of very mo

ity of greater things. He will not wait on luck to open the portals to fortune. He will seize opportunity by the forelock and develop its chances by his industry. Here and there he may go wrong, where judgment or experience is la

ess a kind of sixth sense in the realm of speculative enterprise. These men, it is said, know by inherent instinct, divorced from

absorbed, through a careful and continuous study of events both in the present and the past, so much knowledge, that their minds reach a conclusion automatically, just as the heart beats without any stimulus from the brain. Ask them for the reasons of their decision, and they become inarticula

ars in some overwhelming disaster. He is as quick in losing his fortune as he is in making it. Nothing except

shine, piled in castellated masses against its hills, gaining the sense of the illimitable from the blue horizon of the Mediterranean-a shining land meant for clean exercise and re

ighted tennis courts compete with thirty splendidly furnished casino rooms. But of means for obtaining the results of exercise without the exertion there is no end. The Salle des Bains offers to the

or McKenna. These men believed in industry, not in fortune, and in judgment rather than in chance. The youth of this generation will do well to be guided by

opportunity, but let it remember always that nothing but work and brains counts, and that a man can even work himself into brains. No goddess will open to any