a mistake!

"But acting by that method alone," said he, "is the way I achieved all
my triumphs. I do not pursue that course now, because I am getting
old, and I am in very poor health. Age and ill health make me doubt;
so I have not made any large business success for several years. I
should say that the reason why so many men who are really capable
intellectually fail, is because they are infidels to their own
thought, traitors to their own conception.

"If I could concentrate all the advice of my life into one thing,"
declared this strong wise man, in concluding his comments on failure
and success, "it would be for those young men who expect to do
something constructive to have faith in their idea, and act upon it
before it gets cold. There is a tremendous force in the enthusiasm of
your freshly formed plan. You have contributed largely to the defeat
of your scheme when you have permitted yourself to doubt it."

It was only the other day that the newspapers were full of an
extraordinary achievement of one of the American magicians of
business; and the papers said that the remarkable thing about it was
that the plan flashed upon him in a single evening, as he was leaving
for a long vacation. He acted upon it instantly, and devoted his
fortune, reputation, almost life, to its consummation. He succeeded.
If he had taken six months to have thought over it, his conception
would have been abandoned.

While this man's plan came on him in an evening, a study of his life
shows that, unconsciously to himself, it had been growing for a long
series of years. It flowered out all at once, like the night-blooming
cereus. Caesar decided to cross the Rubicon on the instant? Yes, but we
cannot doubt that this imperial resolution had been formed the day
when in the Forum, as Macaulay describes it, Caesar said that the
future Dictator of Rome might be Pompey, or Crassus, or still
somebody else whom nobody was thinking of (that somebody else being
himself, of course).

And, indeed, Caesar would at that time have been the last that any
Roman would have selected as the master of the world. He was young. He
was small. He seemed almost frail. He was an unspeakable egotist. He
was fastidious in his dress. I have read that he even used perfumes.
And how could the common eye discern, through all of these externals
of frippery, the lion heart, the eagle vision, and the mind of
conquest and empire?

There is a very great danger in the ex