(1) Knowing how to sell

(2) The true idea

(3) Of one’s best capabilities

(4) In the right market or field of service.

Your success will be in direct proportion to your thorough knowledge and continual use of all four parts of the whole secret.  No matter how great your effort, an entire lack of one or more of these principal elements of Certain Success will cause partial or utter failure in your life ambition.  You will be like a man who tries to open a safe with a four-combination lock, though he knows only two or three of the numbers.

No one, however well fitted for success elsewhere, can succeed in the wrong field, or in rendering services for which he is not qualified.  Nor is complete success attainable by a man unless he develops the best that is in him.  Even if he brings to the right market his utmost ability, he may fail miserably by making a false impression that he is unfitted for the opportunity he wants.  Or he may be overlooked because he does not make the true impression of his fitness.

Evidently, in order to gain a chance to succeed, anyone must first sell to the fullest advantage the idea that he is the man for the opportunity already waiting or for the new opening he makes for himself.  Of course he cannot do this surely unless he knows how.  Therefore sales knowledge is universally needed to complement the three other principal elements of the complete secret of certain success.

[Sidenote:  Reasons for Failures]

When we try to explain the failure of any man who seems worthy to have succeeded, we nearly always say, in substance, one of three things about his case: 

“He is a square peg in a round hole;” by which we usually mean he is a right man in the wrong place.

Or, “He is capable of filling a better position;” a more polite way of saying that a man has outgrown his present job but has not developed ability to get a bigger one.

Oftenest, probably, we declare, “He isn’t appreciated.”

Very rarely is a worthy man’s failure in life ascribed to the commonest cause—­his personal inefficiency in selling to the world comprehension of his especial qualifications for success.

[Sidenote:  What Failures Realize]

If a man is a square peg in a round hole, he should realize that his particular qualities must be fitted into the right field for them before he can succeed.  A natural “organizer” cannot achieve his ambitions if he works alone at a routine task.

No sensible man would aspire to fill a better position than he holds, unless he had developed a capacity beyond the limitations of his present work.  The shipping clerk who craves the higher salary of a correspondent knows he cannot hope for the desired promotion if he has not learned to write good business letters.