{"id":251605,"date":"2026-07-13T01:22:05","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T22:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/1kitap1.com\/en\/ambition-and-success-orison-swett-marden\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T01:22:05","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T22:22:05","slug":"ambition-and-success-orison-swett-marden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1kitap1.com\/en\/ambition-and-success-orison-swett-marden\/","title":{"rendered":"Ambition And Success – Orison Swett Marden"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What an easy thing it is to borrow money, to give a note or to give a mortgage! We believe at the time that we can pay all right, but no one can be certain that things will go all right with him. No one knows what the times may bring forth. No one knows whether his health and strength will be spared, or how soon he may be physically or mentally disabled.<\/p>\n

The only true measure of real success is the quality of the ambition. If the animal figures too largely in your ambition, if the quality is coarse, the success will be cheap, no matter how great the quantity. It is an unfortunate thing that so many of our youth should start out in life with only one aim; and that is to make money.<\/p>\n

This becomes the leading purpose in their lives and warps their way of looking at things. Everything else is seen in dwarfed proportions. They do not consider making a life, building character; they are bent only on making money. This is the all- absorbing topic everywhere. The goal we hold in the mind is the model which shapes our lives, and its character is reflected in everything we do.<\/p>\n

Think, therefore, what the influence must be of pointing all our faculties, focusing all of our energies upon the money-making goal! How it must warp and twist and wrench out of their natural orbit the more delicate sentiments, the finer faculties. When everything in us looks moneyward, and the gaze is held persistently upon the dollar and what it will bring, what must be the havoc, the tragedy, the fatal damage in the affections, the friendships, and the social faculties!<\/p>\n

When the affections are chilled and the friendships strangled what is there left in a man but the monster, brute qualities? This is why a youth who starts out with noble aspirations, with fine sensibilities and responsive affections, often becomes hardened in his business career. His finer sensibilities and more delicate faculties atrophy from disuse, because he overdevelops the grasping, greedy, selfish faculties by the modern mania for the almighty dollar. The transformation is so insidious that he does not half realize it until he finds himself stooping to scheming and plotting and underhand cunning, which would have shocked him a few years earlier.<\/p>\n

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In a factory where mariners\u2019 compasses are made, the needles, before they are magnetized, will lie in any position, wherever they are placed, but from the moment they have been touched by the mighty magnet and have been electrified, they are never again the same. They have taken on a mysterious power and are new creatures. Before they are magnetized, they do not answer the call of the North Star, the magnetic pole does not have any effect upon them, but the moment they have been magnetized they swing to the magnetic north, and are ever after loyal and true to their affinity.<\/p>\n

Multitudes of people, like an unmagnetized needle, lie motionless, unresponsive to any stimulus until they are touched by that mysterious force we call ambition. Whence comes this overmastering impulse which pushes human beings on, each to his individual goal? Where is the source of ambition, and how and when does it gain entrance into our lives? How few of us ever stop to think what ambition really means, its cause, or significance!<\/p>\n

Yet, if we could explain just what ambition is, we could explain the mystery of the universe. The instinctive impulse to keep pushing on and up is the most curious and the most interesting thing in human life. It exists in every normal human being, and is just as pronounced and as real as the instinct of self-preservation. I believe this incessant inward prompting, call it ambition or what we will, this something which pushes men to their goal, is the expression in man of the universal force of evolution which is flowing Godward, that it is a part of the great cosmic plan of creation.<\/p>\n

We do not create this urge, we do not manufacture it. Every normal person feels this imperious must which is back of the flesh, but not of it, this internal urge which is ever pushing us on, even at the cost of our discomfort and sacrifice. It is a part of every atom, for all atoms are alive, and this upward impulse is in every one of them. It is in the instinct of the bee, the ant, and in all forms of insect and animal life.<\/p>\n

The same kind of urge that is in the seed buried out of sight and which is ever pushing it up and out through the soil, prodding it to develop itself to the utmost and to give its beauty and fragrance to the world, is in each one of us.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.<\/em><\/p>\n

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