Pushing to the Front
Orison Swett Marden, 1894
Why do people with similar opportunities end up so far apart? Orison Swett Marden gathered hundreds of lives and reached a conclusion: those who get to the front are usually not geniuses, but ordinary people who for a long time and with perseverance used ordinary means. The book is about how to see a chance where you stand, how to save free minutes, how to choose one aim, and how to work better than you are paid.
Who it is for
For those who start with no money and no connections, work for a small salary, cannot choose a calling, or drop what they have begun halfway.
Don't wait for extraordinary chances. Take up ordinary occasions and make them great.
“It Is in Me, and It Shall Come Out”
A young man made his first speech in the British Parliament. After it, the newspaper reporter Woodfall came up to him and said bluntly: this is not for you, you had better go back to what you did before. Richard Sheridan, who until then had written plays, sat for a while with his head propped on his hand, and then answered: “It is in me, and it shall come out.” Later he delivered a prosecution speech against a former ruler of British India, and a famous orator of the time called it the finest speech the House of Commons had ever heard.
The American writer Orison Swett Marden gathered hundreds of such stories in the book “Pushing to the Front.” The first small edition came out in 1894, and by 1911 the book had grown to 66 chapters: on opportunity, spare time, choosing a calling, concentration, perseverance, faith in oneself, thrift. Marden writes like a preacher, and each of his chapters rests on dozens of lives and sayings.
His main idea is one. He proposes to treat great people not as an exception but as a measure: what one person has done, another can do. He takes Lincoln and breaks his success into parts: honesty, perseverance, the habit of finishing what one starts, the thirst to grow. Marden calls none of these traits genius, and all of them, he says, are open to the poorest boy and the most modest girl. One can argue with this, but it is interesting to argue over concrete examples.
Next you will see: why the same strip of iron costs a dollar one time and a million another; what can be carved from a stove log; how much a lost hour costs; what forty thousand unfinished undertakings put at risk; what pay is not put in an envelope; and how one stubborn man laid a cable across the ocean.
One and the Same Strip of Iron
Take a rough strip of iron worth about a dollar. This is how Marden opens one of his strongest chapters. A blacksmith who does not plan to grow beyond his anvil will forge it into horseshoes and earn about ten dollars. He is satisfied: iron is cheap, so why spend effort on it?
Then comes a cutler. He knows how to turn iron into steel, temper it and polish it, and he shows the blacksmith blades worth two thousand dollars. The next craftsman makes fine needles from the same strip. A still more skilled one makes watch springs worth a hundred thousand. The last one refines the tempering to such fineness that he gets hairsprings for watches worth a million dollars, by Marden's reckoning forty times the price of gold of the same weight. His figures are approximate: this is a parable, not a price list.
The author states the meaning himself: the difference between people depends only slightly on the raw material. What decides it is the blows, the fire, the tempering and the polishing, that is, study, experience and labour. And one more thing: each craftsman sees in the iron only as much as he is able to see. Whoever sees only a horseshoe in himself will make a horseshoe, however hard he works.
Marden gives a real-life example. Thomas Jackson, the future general, came to the West Point military academy as the least promising newcomer. In class he would answer that he was still working through a lesson from several days before and had not reached today's, and he stubbornly kept his slow pace. He graduated seventeenth out of seventy, ahead of fifty-three men with better preparation. His classmates said that had the course been ten years long rather than four, he would have finished first.
So what follows? Do not ask whether your metal is good. Ask what you are making of it now, and which next process it needs: which skill to sharpen, which work to make finer.
About the author
Orison Swett Marden, an American writer of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, founded the magazine Success and wrote many books on how to get ahead in life. “Pushing to the Front” came out in 1894, and by 1911 it had grown to 66 chapters.
All books by this author: Orison Swett Marden
Terms from the book
- Napoleon
- Michelangelo
- House of Commons
- Lincoln
- Jackson
- Franklin
- Field
- Sheridan: Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), Irish playwright, author of the comedy The School for Scandal, later a member of the British Parliament and a well-known orator.
- Woodfall: William Woodfall (1746-1803), English journalist who took down and printed the debates in Parliament.
- West Point: The United States Military Academy in New York State, where army officers are trained.
- Stewart: Alexander Turney Stewart (1803-1876), American merchant of Irish birth, creator of one of the first large department stores in New York.
- Maine: A state in the northeast of the United States.
- Longfellow: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), American poet. His translation of the Divine Comedy into English appeared in 1867.
- Dante: Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Italian poet, author of the Divine Comedy. “Inferno” is its first part.
- Coleridge: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English poet and philosopher, author of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.
- Lamb: Charles Lamb (1775-1834), English writer and essayist, Coleridge's schoolmate and friend.
- Bulwer: Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), English novelist and politician, a Member of Parliament, author of several dozen books.
- Maydole: David Maydole, a nineteenth-century American blacksmith from New York State. His hammers became a well-known brand.
- Newfoundland: A large island off the east coast of North America, now part of Canada.
- Great Eastern: A British steamship, the largest vessel of its time. In 1866 it laid the Atlantic cable.
- Cuyler: Theodore Cuyler (1822-1909), American Presbyterian pastor and author of popular books for young people.
All terms
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