Imagine being this close to achieving your goal and quitting. Don’t do that. Read on…
Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF):
You’re going to want to quit your goal(s) when it gets really tough and your success feels unlikely. Change direction a little and keep going because your success is closer than you think!
Here’s the story of Darby and his uncle who missed their goal and it may be the reason YOU ARE missing your goal(s)…
I used to ride my bike through a small town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore called Williamsburg a few times a week when I lived in Maryland.
There was a guy who lived in Williamsburg named of R.U. Darby who tells the story of his uncle and his adventure in gold mining that’s a GOLDEN life lesson.
It was the gold rush and R.U. Darby’s uncle had read stories of how regular people just like him had stuck gold and how it changed their lives forever.
He thought about what it would feel like to achieve a goal like this and the rewards it would bring him and his family.
He convinced Darby to go west and get their gold together.
There wasn’t much going on in Williamsburg at the time so Darby said yes and they packed their bags and headed west to Colorado.
Darby nor his uncle knew much about finding gold.
Darby brought this up, but his uncle said he wasn’t worried because he’d figured out things in the past and would do it again this time.
They landed in a small town in the mountains where several others had recently been finding large amounts of ore.
Usually finding ore meant there was gold.
They bought a shovel and an pickaxe at the local store.
Each day would set up to dig in a new location.
A few weeks went by.
Darby and his uncle weren’t having much success.
But, as luck would have it, one day they found traces of ore four feet down next to a creek a few miles from town.
They staked their claim and had a surveyor come out to see what he thought.
Sure enough through a probe they found lots of ore. After examination the ore had traces of gold.
After the first extraction, it turned out they owned one of the richest mines in Colorado!
They went back to Williamsburg with the news. They were heroes and used that status to raise money from people in town to buy the mining equipment they needed to scale up quickly.
Everyone would be rich!
Once they got everything set up the first drills went down.
Darby and his uncle’s hopes went up, but something happened-
The metal that was expected disappeared.
How could this happen?
They desperately tried to find more gold, but it was gone. Vanished.
Eventually they gave up, sold all the machinery and the mine to a junkyard owner in town, and went home.
The junkyard owner wasn’t the smartest guy in the world, but he believed Darby and his uncle quit too soon.
He called an engineer who had found gold for other people who had struggled to find gold where initial surveys said it was located.
The engineer went out to the site and found that the Darby and his uncle were not familiar with geological faults.
The expected result would be found just a meter from where Darby and his uncle had stopped drilling.
ONE METER!
In the end, the junk yard owner extracted millions of dollars for going just one meter further in a little different direction…with the same equipment Darby and his uncle used.
Sometimes you just have to lift your head up from working on your goal, make a little change in direction, go a little further, and you’ll find gold.
Your move.
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* credit to Dan VC our lead engineer at File Finder for the inspiration of this article.