Three Feet from Gold

Sometimes the next breakthrough is closer than we think, but persistence alone isn’t enough. We have to keep learning.

Three Feet from Gold

Why the next obstacle may be telling you to learn, not quit

Over the past several months, as Bill Sommers and I worked through the final stages of writing and publishing Unleashing Potential: How Great Leaders Facilitate Success, I found myself saying something repeatedly:

The finish line is never as close as you think.

Every time we thought we were almost there, something else appeared: another editing decision, another formatting issue, another publishing requirement we hadn't anticipated, or another detail involving the cover, distribution, endorsements, marketing, or launch.

We would solve one problem, look ahead, and think, Now we're almost finished.

Then we would discover the next thing we didn't know we didn't know.

One day, after I made another comment about the finish line continuing to move, Bill reminded me of an old story: Three Feet from Gold.

The Story Behind “Three Feet from Gold”

The story was popularized by Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich. As Hill tells it, during the gold rush, R. U. Darby's uncle discovered gold and invested in the equipment necessary to mine it. At first, things looked promising. Then the vein of gold disappeared.

They kept drilling, but eventually concluded the gold was gone. They sold their equipment to a junk dealer and walked away.

The junk dealer brought in a mining engineer who studied the situation and concluded that the previous miners had failed to account for a fault line. The new owner resumed drilling and reportedly found the vein of gold just three feet from where the others had stopped.

Whether every detail of the story happened exactly as Hill described it isn't really the point. The story has endured because the metaphor is so powerful.

How often do we stop without knowing how close we might be?

But I think there is another lesson in the story that is just as important.

Persistence Isn't Enough

It's easy to interpret “Three Feet from Gold” as simply saying:

Don't quit. Keep digging.

There is certainly value in persistence. But persistence by itself doesn't guarantee success.

Darby and his uncle had persisted. They kept drilling after the gold disappeared. What changed the outcome wasn't simply that the next person was willing to drill longer. He sought expertise, gathered new information, questioned the assumptions that had led the previous owners to give up, and then acted on what he learned.

That distinction matters.

There is a difference between persistence and stubbornness. Persistence means staying committed to the goal while remaining willing to learn, adjust, and change how you pursue it. Stubbornness is continuing to do the same thing because you are convinced it eventually has to work.

Leadership requires the first, not the second.

One Finish Line Becomes Another Starting Line

Bill and I eventually did cross the publishing finish line. Unleashing Potential launched on September 9.

For a brief moment, we could say, “We did it.”

Then came the next starting line.

We set a goal of selling 3,000 copies in our first 90 days. That has created an entirely new learning curve.

Writing a book and getting people to discover and read a book are two very different things. We are learning about Amazon advertising, digital marketing, outreach, lead generation, social media, and what resonates with potential readers.

Some things work. Some don't. Sometimes we think we have figured something out, only to discover another challenge.

Sound familiar?

We have no way of knowing whether we're three feet from gold or thirty feet from gold.

But we do know that simply digging harder isn't the answer.

We have to keep learning.

Leadership Is Learning

In Unleashing Potential, we ended our final chapter with what we called our “+1” leadership principle:

Leadership is learning.

This experience continues to reinforce that belief for me.

Leaders rarely have perfect information. We don't always know how close we are to achieving what we're trying to accomplish. And we certainly don't know everything we will need to know when we begin.

What we can do is remain curious, ask questions, seek perspectives from people who know things we don't, challenge our assumptions, pay attention to what is and isn't working, and adjust.

Perhaps the next obstacle isn't evidence that we're farther from the finish line than we thought.

Perhaps it's simply telling us there is something else we need to learn.

Bill and I don't know whether we're three feet from gold—or thirty.

But we're still digging. More importantly, we're still learning.