Acres of Diamonds

Earl Nightingale tells the story of Dr. Russell Herman Conwell, the founder of Temple University. When Dr. Conwell first began raising money in order to start this prestigious college, he would tell a true story that he called “Acres of Diamonds”:

According to the story, there was a farmer in Africa who had heard how other farmers had became wealthy from discovering diamond mines. So, he sold his farm and set out to find some diamonds for himself. After several years of searching and chasing rumors, the poor farmer never found one diamond. Disenchanted and depressed, the farmer threw himself into a river and drowned.

One day not long after, the man who bought the farmer’s land was walking the across the farm and spotted a large shiny stone in his stream. Thinking the stone was just a piece of crystal, he set it on his mantel. Several months later, a visitor to this man’s farm noticed the shiny stone on the mantel. The visitor, who had some experience with diamonds, recognized the stone as one of the largest diamonds ever discovered. The farm turned out to be the most productive diamond mine ever discovered on the African continent.

So many of us are standing in the middle of our own acres of diamonds. The diamonds may be right under our nose. It may be our jobs, our family, relationships with others, yet we keep running from one thing to another looking for that winning lottery ticket. Like the disenchanted farmer, many people lose their dreams as they get older. While suicide is a rare extreme, some do die mentally.

Instead, if we can look to our farm and the resources around us, we too may find that we are sitting on top of a “diamond” mine. We can be discovering diamonds. If then we find that our ”farm” is not full of diamonds, we can then begin to search farther afield with confidence knowing that we have fully explored our current possibilities.