The Price of Success

It was copyrighted in 1920 by The Wheeler Syndicate Inc. and was written by Dorothy Dix.

Read, enjoy and learn. You might be inspired to look at things differently and make some positive changes.

One of the greatest obstacles to human happiness consists in our unwillingness to recognize the fact that everything in this world has a price tag on it and that we must pay cash over the counter for everything we get.

Something for something.

Nothing for nothing.

Pinch back cheap. Fine gold, high. Is the immutable law of nature that never changes.

We admit the truth of this so far as other people are concerned. But when it comes to ourselves we cherish the fallacious hope that we shall escape the common fate.

We think that somehow, we are going to be able to graft our way through life that some miracle will happen to us so that we will get the sweet without the bitter, and gather where we have not sown, and reap where we have not planted.

It is a fool's dream. It never happened. For value received we pay, pay, pay. And this is true equally of spiritual and material things.

Do you want love? You must pay for it with your heart's blood. You must pay for it with a million sacrifices, with a million anxieties, with a million fears. And after you have bought love you must keep on paying for it and preferring it before yourself.

The people that never have love are those who are too stingy and selfish to buy it. They are too self centered and egotistical to pay the price that love demands. Those who love are those who grow tired of continually paying in little attentions, and little considerations, in little kisses and caresses, on a debt that is never paid in full this side of the grave.

And those who refuse to buy love because it lays upon one burdens and calls for self-sacrifice, they also pay for what they get. They escape the slavery of toiling for a family whose needs suck up a man's income as a sponge does water.

But they pay in loneliness, in the silence of rooms in which no woman's laugh is ever heard, or where there comes the patter of little feet. They pay in a desolate old age, barren of interest and lacking all humanities.

Do you wish health? You must pay for it with abstinence, with self-control, with intelligent care of the body and by doing a thousand things you do not want to do, and doing without a thousand things you greatly desire to do.

Sometimes nature runs a long health credit account with a man or woman but in the end she admits her accounts and for every broken law of hygiene the offender must pay with compound interest.

The young man who drinks too much, the young man who burns the candle at both ends, the young man who is a roué thinks that he can have his fill and sow his wild oats and get off scott free.

But he doesn't. He pays the price in shattered nerves; in premature senility and insanity. There is no hospital, no insane asylum in the world that will not tell you that three-fourths of the men patients brought their fate upon themselves.

The woman who lives on candy and sweets, who takes no exercise, who wears clothes that are first aid to pneumonia, who lives on her nerves and in a perpetual strain of gadding from party to party, thinks that she can likewise sin against nature and escape the penalty, but the price she pays enriches sanitariums and unites nerve and lung specialists in the millionaire class.

Do you wish success? The price of that is all that you must have got. To buy success you must give every ounce of strength in you and then some more.

You must give every thought of your head, and every aspiration of your soul.

You must count neither sickness, nor weariness, nor discouragement in paying your bill.

You must work while others play. You must save while others spend. You must take the hard road when the easy one lies invitingly before you. You must crucify your vanity and think only of your object, not yourself. You must stand the gaff, take criticism gratefully; endure insolence patiently; deny yourself the pleasures of both love and hatred.

Perpetual sacrifice on the altar of one's desire. Self immolation to one purpose. Ceaseless striving. Unending labor. Dauntless courage and endurance. These are the coins with which one buys success, and it is because so few are willing to pay the price that there are so many failures in life.

Men and women believe that there is some royal road to fame and fortune in which they can joy ride in a limousine or that there is some magic carpet that will wait them to success without an effort on their part.

It never happens. There is no easy way to the heights. Every step of it must be taken with blood and tears, and faint hearts are not strong enough to pay so great a price. So many get weary and lay down their tools. They get fagged and drop out of the race.

They do not like the company they are forced to keep on part of the journey and they turn aside to where the society is more elegant and agreeable, or they argue with themselves that after all success isn't worth what life asks for it and they content themselves with some cheaper bargain.

Every day of your life you see lonely loveless, friendless people, sick people, failures, who rail at the injustice of fate, but the fault is their own, not fate's.

They could have had the thing they desired if they would have paid the price but they would not.