This illustration of persistent effort to gain a desired chance should help to keep you from becoming discouraged about your prospects for success.  Bear in mind the old, familiar motto, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”  Stick to your prospecting when you know you are on the right lead.  It has been estimated that the busy bee inserts its proboscis into flowers 3,600,000 times to obtain a single pound of honey.  But the bee is the only insect, remember, that lives on honey.

[Sidenote:  No Poor Territory For Success]

The poor salesman is apt to complain that his territory is poor. The good salesman makes any territory good. So in prospecting your field of immediate opportunities, make the best, not the worst, of your present circumstances.  The star base-ball player does not refuse to play on the small-town team because it isn’t good enough for him.  The great Ty Cobb first made them “sit up and take notice” in a bush league.  Undoubtedly he felt then that he was fit for better company, but he put in his best licks and played big-city ball on the small-town team.  That was excellent prospecting for the chance he wanted with the best clubs.  From the very beginning of his career, Ty Cobb has used masterly salesmanship to get across to the world true ideas of his best capabilities in his chosen field.

To-day there is no poor territory for success. Telegraph and telephone and wireless methods of communication, electric light and power, railroads and inter-urban car service, farm tractors, passenger automobiles, motor trucks, and the airplane have so revolutionized the inter-relations of men that all the former great distances of different locations and view-points have been shortened almost to nothingness.  The whole world lives now in a single community of interest.  The great war has taught us that each individual is close to everyone else.  In your prospecting for success you are not limited by any narrow boundary of opportunities.  Wherever you are, newspapers and magazines bring to your door chances for big success.  If you search for prospects in everything you read you should be able to reach out all over the earth with your capability.  An ambitious man I never had heard of before wrote to me at one time from South Africa to secure a selected territory for the sale of automobiles in a western city of the United States.  From a distance of nearly half the circumference of the earth he got his chance to succeed.

[Sidenote:  The Fields of Opportunity Are Broad]

A clerk in a Los Angeles real estate office received a letter from an acquaintance in Chicago who had spent his summer vacation in Michigan.  The Chicago man wrote that the farmers of the Traverse Bay region were made rich by a bumper crop of potatoes just harvested.  The Californian saw a chance for success in this bit of information.  He worked out his idea and talked it over with his employers.  He sold them on it.