Acres of Diamonds: The Farmer Who Went Looking

Russell Conwell was an American lawyer and minister who founded Temple University in Philadelphia.He gave one lecture, “Acres of Diamonds,” more than six thousand times, and he used the money it earned to help over a thousand poor young men pay for college.The lecture begins with a story he said he heard from an old Arab guide while traveling down the Tigris River.

“The old guide was leading my camel along the riverbank, telling me story after story, until I grew tired and stopped listening.Then he took off his cap, swung it in the air to catch my eye, and said, ‘Now I will tell you a story that I keep for my particular friends.’Once, he said, not far from the River Indus, there lived a Persian farmer named Ali Hafed. He owned a large farm with orchards, fields and gardens, and he was rich and contented: contented because he was rich, and rich because he was contented.

One day a wise old priest visited Ali Hafed, sat down by his fire, and told him how diamonds were made deep inside the earth.‘A diamond,’ said the priest, ‘is a frozen drop of sunlight.’He told the farmer that with one diamond the size of his thumb he could buy the whole county, and with a mine of diamonds he could put his children on thrones.

Ali Hafed went to bed that night a poor man. He had lost nothing, but he was poor because he was discontented, and discontented because he feared he was poor.Early the next morning he woke the priest and asked where he could find diamonds. ‘Find a river that runs over white sands between high mountains,’ said the priest, ‘and in those sands you will always find diamonds.’

So Ali Hafed sold his farm, collected his money, left his family with a neighbor, and went off in search of diamonds.He searched through Palestine and on into Europe, until his money was all spent and he stood in rags on the shore at Barcelona, in Spain.There, poor and hopeless, he threw himself into the great waves rolling in from the sea, and he was never seen again.When the guide finished, I thought it was the strangest story I had ever heard: the hero was dead in the first chapter, and there seemed to be nothing more to it.”