There are two levels of sad..
Speak about the people who never start, and those who start but don’t succeed the first time and quit.
Let me tell you a sad story from the days of the gold rush in the American mid-West.
There was a who got caught up in the gold fever of those times and headed west with dreams of striking it rich by prospecting and hopefully finding gold.
He laid claim to a plot and got down to work with his pick and shovel. The going was tough, but he was his determined. After weeks of hard work, he finally struck gold!
He now needed to mine the gold, for which he required specialized machinery. So, he discreetly covered the mine’s entrance, returned home, and shared the exciting news with his family and a handful of neighbors.
Together, they pooled their resources for the much-needed machinery, and it was promptly shipped. Once everything was in place, he returned to the mine.
The first load of ore was extracted and sent off to a smelter. The gold
yielded from the ore, indicated that they were sitting on one of the richest mines in Colorado! A few more shipments of this valuable ore, and the prospector could pay of his debts, followed by incredible wealth. The drills went down, and their hopes went up.
Down, down down, they went. But then, suddenly the vein of gold ore vanished into thin air. It was as if they had reached the end of the rainbow, and the pot of gold had mysteriously disappeared. They persisted, drilling frantically in an attempt to rediscover the vein, but their efforts were in vain.
In the end, they made a heart-wrenching decision—they chose to QUIT.
They sold the machinery to a scrap dealer for a meager sum, and returned home crestfallen.
The scrap man who they sold the machinery to, know the story and had the foresight to take the advice of a mining engineer. The engineer took one look at the mine and did some calculations. His conclusion was clear—the project had failed because the owners were unfamiliar with “fault lines.”
According to his calculations, the gold vein would be just three feet from where the original prospector had stopped.
The scrap man immediately began digging on the spot, and guess what?
They found gold just three feet down. The “Junk” man, armed with this knowledge, extracted millions of dollars’ worth of ore from the mine. He knew better than to give up.
Now I find it very sad when people fail to get started, but I think it is even sadder when they do start, but quit at the first obstacle, just the the gold prospector in our story.