Self-Help: Application and Perseverance

Smiles filled his book with true stories of scientists, artists and inventors.In this chapter he asks whether success comes from genius or from steady effort.

“Fortune has often been blamed for being blind, but fortune is not as blind as people are.Those who look at real life will find that fortune is usually on the side of the hard-working, as the winds and waves are on the side of the best sailors.Even in the highest kinds of study, the most useful qualities are the common ones: common sense, attention, application and perseverance.Some have even said that genius is only common sense made stronger, and the French writer Buffon said of genius, ‘It is patience.’

Newton certainly had one of the greatest minds that ever lived.Yet when he was asked how he had made his amazing discoveries, he answered modestly, ‘By always thinking about them.’‘I keep the subject constantly before me,’ he said, ‘and wait until the first light of morning slowly opens, little by little, into a full and clear light.’‘If I have done the public any service,’ he said, ‘it is due to nothing but hard work and patient thought.’

Dalton, the chemist, refused to be called ‘a genius’ and said that everything he had done came from simple hard work.If we look at the lives of great people, we find that the best inventors, artists and thinkers owed their success mostly to tireless work.They were people who turned everything into gold, even time itself.”