If we can be shown where the deciding pivotal choices are, we can succeed. When we finally understand that, our happiness will not be determined by the material things, either on one hand or on the other. The choice is between good and evil, and that is a very different issue indeed. Will we ever learn that the choice is not between fame and obscurity, nor is the choice between wealth and poverty. It was Benjamin Franklin who said, “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other” ( Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1743). We therefore struggle through life, perhaps missing both fame and fortune, to finally learn that we can indeed succeed without possessing either or we may one day have both and learn that neither is basic to the recipe for true success and complete happiness. That leaves us only one course-to learn for ourselves by experience, about prominence and wealth and their opposites. We question that either is an objective witness. Therefore, we reject as reliable authorities both those who have fame and fortune and those who have not. What else could he say and not count himself a failure? If someone who has possession of fame and fortune asserts that neither matters to success or happiness, we suspect that his expression is patronizing. If one who is not well known and not well compensated claims that he has learned that neither fame nor fortune is essential to success, we tend to become suspicious of his statement as being self-serving. The truth about this is remarkably difficult to teach and difficult to learn. The premise is false! It is not true! The Lord taught otherwise.
It is the understanding of almost everyone that success, to be complete, must include a generous portion of both fame and fortune as essential ingredients. It is the misapprehension of most people that if you are good, really good, at what you do, you will eventually be both widely known and well compensated. And now the paragraph over which I’ve labored with such exertion: That makes it very difficult to have it universally regarded as being important.īut beyond the fact that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, that there has been a restoration of His gospel through prophets-after that, this is the one truth I most want to teach my children. And I fear that when I’ve given it to you, many of you will say, “Well, I knew that already,” and regard it as prosaic and unimaginative-even dull for what I want to reveal is ordinary, commonplace. I have struggled, really struggled, to frame a paragraph to express what I want to say. I want to reveal something to you, and I use the word reveal purposefully.
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