In Napoleon Hill’s classic book Think and Grow Rich, he shares a powerful story about a gold miner during the Gold Rush in the 1850s.

A man and his uncle travelled from Maryland to Colorado (in the 1850s) in pursuit of literally striking gold.

and to their surprise and excitement, they did.

The problem was that even though they found the gold, they still needed heavy machinery to extract the gold from the ground.

They travelled back to Maryland (once again in the 1850s) to raise capital from friends and family in order to purchase the heavy machinery.

Once they raised the capital, bought the machinery, and travelled back to their umminned fortune, they started digging.

With their new toys in hand, they extracted their first vein of gold.

All the hard work was paying off and they were about to be extremely wealthy.

Until the vein dried up.

Seemingly overnight, the never ending supply of gold ended.

Like any wise man, they started digging around the area to see if they could find anything.

They dug and dug and dug for weeks with no luck.

Defeated, tired, and frustrated they gave up.

They sold their toys and the rights to the land to a nearby local.

This local decided to bring in a mining engineer to evaluate the land in order to see if it was worth pursuing any further.

The mining engineer reviewed the rocks and realized that the gold vein just shifted along the fault lines. ( don’t ask me to explain geology, I barely passed that class in college…)

The local started digging right where the man and his uncle stopped digging.

And struck gold three feet later.

Heartbreaking. Inspiring. And challenging.

You never know how close you are to striking gold.

You can’t control when you “strike gold” but you can control how long and how often you work for it.

Maybe your next gold vein is just 3 feet away. The only way to know is to just keep going.

Go out and make difference.