Lessons in Character

On June 20, 1933, Ernest took another look at his father as he left the house. Ernest's heart broke at the sight of his father standing on the porch with his shoulders slumped and his posture broken. His father promised his mother the world, but as a poor farmer, he was unable to deliver.

No matter how hard he worked, Ernest's father was never able to get his family out of squalor. His life, he felt, was a total failure.

In the past, Ernest tried to talk his father into a new business idea, but his father dismissed the idea as ridiculous, because that type of business was illegal the United States.

After Ernest left, the old farmer went into the house and picked up his pistol and walked out to the field where his wife was working and shot her in the back of the head. He then went back into the house and took his own life.

If only Ernest's father had learned the lesson that a man named R. U. Darby had learned years before, maybe he would have looked at the situation a little differently.

R. U. Darby was employed by his uncle to go to Colorado to help dig up a gold vein he had found. They got loans from family and friends to buy the equipment they needed to bring up the gold and when they got to Colorado, they got straight to work. They brought up enough gold to pay off all of their loans, but shortly after, the vein disappeared. They dug around, but where unable to find any more gold.

Discouraged, they sold all of their equipment and the land to a junk man for a few hundred dollars. The junk man hired an engineer to look at the mine and he discovered that, because of a fault line, the gold vein was broken in half and the rest of the gold would be found just three feet below where R. U. Darby and his uncle stopped digging and the junk man went on to become a millionaire many times over.

Mr. Darby now had a choice to make. He could have wallowed in his failure and suffered on his cross of discouragement, or he could have learned from his choice to give up.

How many times are we faced with this choice? Sometimes we find ourselves in a period of despair and discouragement. Maybe we have just experienced a catastrophic failure in our lives. The failure may seem to be so great that it may take the rest of our lives just to recover.

How easy is it to throw our hands up and say, "I quit"? How easy would it be to just go home and sit in front of the T.V. and make no attempt to redeem ourselves, after a hug failure?

How hard is it to pick ourselves up after a humiliating defeat? How hard is it to face the same struggles that have embarrassed and humiliated us in the past?

We all know that the former is much easier to do, but it is the latter that makes us what we are as human beings. If we decide, against the odds, that we are going to go back for more abuse and pain and humiliation, all in the name of some kind of success, it is then that we are making the greatest investment in ourselves.

Education is great. You can do a lot, if you are educated. Work experience is also wonderful. But, the best investment we can make in ourselves is an investment in character.

Character is the basic building block of success. And the only way you can develop character is through the use of courage and persistence. If you have the courage to get up off the ground, and try again, and you have the persistence to get up off the ground no matter how many times you fall, you will develop very strong character and you will ultimately succeed. And more then likely, your success will be far greater then you ever expected.

In many stories, surveys, interviews and studies of the most successful people in the world, we find that many of them have faced the most difficult and catastrophic failures just before they realized there greatest successes.

It is these failures and disappointments that develop our character and ultimately make us successful in all of our endeavors. The motivational speaker and author Napoleon Hill said it best when he wrote "Every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the seed of an equivalent or a greater benefit"

R. U. Darby learned this very well. He decided to take the road of character development. He created a slogan for himself which he repeated as often as he could. He said "I stopped three feet from gold, but I never stop because men say no". When ever things looked bleakest to him, he decided to "dig three more feet". As a result he became one of the leading insurance sails men in the country, making annual profits of well over a million dollars.

If Ernest's father had only learned this lesson and just waited five more months before falling victim to despair, he would have been able to be a part of the venture that Ernest and his brother started. They where raisin farmers, like their father. And when prohibition was repealed, only five months after their parents' death, they went to the local library and found a recipe for wine. They stopped growing grapes for raisins and began making wine. Despite having to compete with over 800 other wineries in California alone, Ernest and Julio Gallo where able to build one of the largest wine producers in the world.