“One or another
    In money or guns may surpass his brother. 
    But whoever shall know,
    As the long days go. 
    That to live is happy, has found his heaven.”

It is in ignoring this doctrine of the poet that so many men go wrong.  They practise the doctrines of success:  they attain it, and then they lose happiness because they cannot stop.  The flower is brilliant, but the fruit has a sour taste.  The final crown in the career of success is to know when to retire.

“Call no man happy,” says the ancient sage, “until he is dead,” drawing his moral from the cruel death of a great King.  I would say, call no man successful until he has left business with enough money to live the kind of life that pleases him.  The man who holds on beyond this limit is laying up trouble for himself and disappointment for others.

Success in the financial world is the prerogative of young men.  A man who has not succeeded in the field before middle-age comes upon him, will never succeed in the fundamental sense of the term.  An honourable and prosperous career may, indeed, lie before him, but he will never reach the heights.  He will just go on from year to year, making rather more or rather less money, by a toil to which only death or old age will put a term.  And I have not written this book for the middle-aged, but for the young.  To them my advice would be, “Succeed young, and retire as young as you can.”

The fate of the successful who hold on long after they have amassed a great, or at least an adequate, fortune, is written broad across the face of financial history.  The young man who has arrived has formed the habit and acquired the technique of business.  The habit has become part of his being.  How hard it is to give it up!  His technique has become almost universally successful.  If he has made L50,000 by it, why not go on and make half a million; if he has made a million, why not go on and make three?  All that you have to do, says the subtle tempter, is to reproduce the process of success indefinitely.  The riches and the powers of the world are to be had in increasing abundance by the mere exercise of qualities which, though they have been painfully acquired, have now become the very habit of pleasure.  How dull life would seem if the process of making money was abandoned; how impossible for a man of ripe experience to fail where the mere stripling had succeeded?  The temptation is subtle, but the logic is wrong.  Success is not a process which can reproduce itself indefinitely in the same field.  The dominant mind loses its elasticity:  it fails to appreciate real values under changed conditions.  Victory has become to it not so much a struggle as a habit.  Then follows the decline.  The judgment begins to waver or go astray out of a kind of self-worship, which makes the satisfaction of self, and not the realisation of what is possible, the dominant object in every transaction.  There will be plenty of