h individual is close to everyone else. In
your prospecting for success you are not limited by any narrow boundary
of opportunities. Wherever you are, newspapers and magazines bring to
your door chances for big success. If you search for prospects in
everything you read you should be able to reach out all over the earth
with your capability. An ambitious man I never had heard of before wrote
to me at one time from South Africa to secure a selected territory for
the sale of automobiles in a western city of the United States. From a
distance of nearly half the circumference of the earth he got his chance
to succeed.

[Sidenote: The Fields of Opportunity Are Broad]

A clerk in a Los Angeles real estate office received a letter from an
acquaintance in Chicago who had spent his summer vacation in Michigan.
The Chicago man wrote that the farmers of the Traverse Bay region were
made rich by a bumper crop of potatoes just harvested. The Californian
saw a chance for success in this bit of information. He worked out his
idea and talked it over with his employers. He sold them on it. They
sent him East loaded with facts about "the glorious West" and brim-full
of Los Angeles peptimism. Aided by cold weather in Michigan that winter,
the western real estate man eventually sold California irrigated
ranches to a score of Michigan farmers who suddenly had made sufficient
money to retire from potato raising, and who were old enough to be
strongly attracted by the idea of owning and cultivating land in a more
genial climate. Thus a sentence in a letter led straight to the success
of the clerk who perceived his prospects and knew how to make the most
of them.

[Sidenote: Know Local Conditions]

While distances have been bridged by modern swift means of communication
and transportation, every locality has opportunities for success that
are peculiar to it alone. Conversely every locality is handicapped in
certain ways. Therefore in your prospecting for success _study the
conditions in your especial field_. As a salesman of yourself, you
should know your "territory," its advantages and disadvantages in
particular respects. Men are doing business in your town. There is no
better way to gain a prospect to succeed with a house in your home
community than to demonstrate to the head of the concern that you
comprehend just what he is "up against" on the one hand, and on the
other what "edge" he has on businesses in the same line located
elsewh