Men will fail who have deserved to succeed and
who might have succeeded with a little more tenacity or under slightly
more favorable conditions. Men who have deserved to fail will succeed
because of certain collateral but partly irrelevant merits--just as an
architect may succeed who is ingenious about making his clients' houses
comfortable and building them cheap. In a thousand different ways an
individual enterprise, conceived and conducted with faith and ability,
may prove to be abortive. Moreover, the sacrifices necessary to success
are usually genuine sacrifices. The architect who wishes to build up a
really loyal following by really good work must deliberately reject many
possible jobs; and he must frequently spend upon the accepted jobs more
money than is profitable. But the foregoing is merely tantamount to
saying, as we have said, that the adventure involves a real risk. A
resolute, intelligent man undertakes a doubtful and difficult
enterprise, not because it is sure to succeed, but because if it
succeeds, it is worth the risk and the cost, and such is the case with
the contemporary American adventurer.
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