"The Passion For Achievement" By Orison Swett Marden

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I've been trying to collect a full, complete set of every Success Magazine printed in the 1800’s.

The first magazine was December 1897 (I’ve got 2 copies of it!), and then it ran for a complete year as a monthly magazine, then in December of 1898, it turned into a weekly magazine and ran that way until the end of the century.

So there are 12 monthly magazines (I’m missing 2 of them) and then 55 weekly issues (and I’m missing 10 of them).

You can see my almost complete collection in the attached picture!

Someday I want to publish all of these for members, but it will be a monumental task. I’ve also thought about just pulling out the best of the best, and printing a book with just those articles. You’ll have to let me know what you’d like the most.

But one thing I do with every issue is try to find and read any of the articles written by Orison Swett Marden. He was the founder of the magazine, and one of the most prolific writers during the New Thought Movement. I love everything he has to say! Here is one of my favorite articles I found in the September 1909 Success Magazine that I think you’ll love if you’re an achiever like me:

The Passion For Achievement - By Orison Swett Marden

“What are the motives which keep men slaving after they have acquired a competence?” “Is ambition a selfish attribute?” These and similar questions have often been asked me.

The passion for conquest, for power, the love of achievement, is one of the most dominant and persistent characteristics of human nature. With most men the bread-and-butter and housing problem, the question of getting a living, a competence, is only one, and often one of the least, of the motives for an active career.

We have an instinctive feeling that we have been set in motion by a bigger power; that there is an invisible spring within us—the “imperious must”—which impels us to go onward, to weave the pattern given us in the Mount of Transfiguration of our highest moment, to make our life-vision real. A divine impulse constantly urges us to reach upward to our highest ideal. There is something back of our supreme ambition deeper than a mere personal gratification, we instinctively feel that there is a vital connection between it and the great plan of creation, the progress, the final goal of the race.

We are dimly conscious that we owe something to the world, and that it is our duty to pay the debt. There is something within us which protests against our living idle, purposeless lives; which tells us that our debt to the race is a personal one; that it can not be paid by our ancestors, by proxy. It tells us that our message to humanity is not transferable; that we must deliver it ourselves. No matter how much money we may have, we don’t feel quite right—really happy—unless we are doing our part of the world’s work. We feel that it is mean, contemptible, to be drones in the great human hive; to eat, drink, wear, and use what others earn by hard labor. We have a sneaking feeling that we are criminals; that it is unworthy of us to shirk a manly or womanly part in life; it violates our sense of justice, of fairness.

Every normal person is born with a message for humanity, with a great sacred obligation to give his best to the world. Your talent was not given you merely to provide bread and butter and luxuries for yourself and family, but to make the world a little better place to live in, to pay your debt to humanity, to make the largest possible man or woman of yourself.

These promptings of humanity and the yearnings of every normal man and woman for a fuller, completer life; the craving for expansion, for growth; the desire to objectify our life-visions, to give birth to the children of our brain, to exercise our inventiveness, our ingenuity, to express our artistic temperament, our talents, whatever they may be; the inherent, instinctive longing to become that which we were intended to be; to weave the life-pattern given us at birth—these are the impeling motives for a creative career.

One man expresses himself, or delivers his message to humanity, through his inventive ability to give his fellow man that which will emancipate them for drudgery; another delivers his message through his artistic ability; another through science; another through oratory, through business, or his pen, and so on through all the modes of human expression, each delivers himself according to his talent. In every case the highest motive is beyond the question of mere living-getting.

The great artist does not paint simply for a living, but because he must express that divine thing in him that is struggling for expression. He has an unconquerable desire to put upon canvas the picture that haunts his brain. We all long to bring out the ideal, whatever it may be, that lives within us. We want to see it; we want the world to see it. We long to create, to see the children of our brain, just as the artist longs to see the children of his brain, his mental visions, on canvas.

It is not so much what men get out of their struggles, as the inherent passion in every normal man for self-expression—to do the biggest thing possible to him—that urges them on. This is what keeps men going, always struggling to achieve.

Some savage tribes believe that the spirit of every conquered enemy enters into the conqueror and makes him so much stronger. It is certain that every business or professional conquest, or financial victory, every triumph over obstacles, makes an achiever so much a larger, so much a stronger man.

The exercising of the creative faculties, the stretching of the mind over greater and greater problems and the solving of them, constitute a powerful mental tonic and give a satisfaction and self-complacency which nothing else gives. Think of the tameness, the insipidity, the weakness, the mental flabbiness of the life of the inactive and purposeless man who has nothing special to do, no great life-motive, no “imperious must” pushing him on, in comparison with that of the man who feels all of the forces within him leaving and tugging away to accomplish a mighty purpose!

The idle, aimless does not know the meaning of personal power or the satisfaction which comes to the doer, the achiever.

Those who wonder why men who already have a competence continue to struggle, to play the game with as much zeal and ardor as ever, when they might retire from the field, little realized the tremendous fascination of the great life-game especially for those who have artistic talent and those who have the ability to do things; men who have great executive powers, qualities of leadership.

With as much reason might we wonder why great singers, artists, actors, authors, do not retire from active life, and give up their works when they are at the zenith of their power, when they are just in a position to do the greatest thing possible to them, as to wonder why great business and professional men do not retire in the most fruitful period of their lives merely because they have attained a competency.

The unborn creatures of the imagination of the artist, the author, the actor, the singer, struggling for expression, haunt them until they are objectified, made real. So the ambition and ideals of the business, the professional man, clamor for expression as long as he is able to continue in the game.

Those who have never won big battles in business do not realize what a deep hold this passion for conquest, the insatiable thirst for victory, gets upon the achiever; how it grips him, encourages him, nerves him for greater triumphs.

A great businessman develops the lust of power, the passion for conquest, as did Napoleon or other great warriors. The desire to achieve, to dominate, grow stronger and more vigorous with every new victory.

The ambition for greater achievements is fed but every fresh triumph, and the passion for conquest, which years of winning and the habit of conquering have strengthened, becomes colossal, often abnormal, so that men who have grown accustomed to wielding enormous power shutter at the very thought of laying down the sceptre.

Think of E. H. Harriman, J. Pierpont Morgan, J. J. Hill, and other great business potentates of our country, whose power governs vast fields of activity—think of these men retiring, giving up active life, because they have acquired a competence! Why, some of our captains of industry, railroad men, bankers, and financiers, wield more real power today, exercise a greater influence upon civilization than many European rulers.

We hear a great deal of criticism of the greed of rich men, which keeps them pushing ahead after they have more money than they can ever use to advantage, but the fact is, many of these men find their reward in the exercise of their powers, not in amassing money, and greed plays a comparatively small part in their struggle for conquest.

Of course this is not true of all rich men. Many of them are playing the game, and keep on playing it, for the love of accumulating. Their selfishness and greed have been indulged so long that they amount to a passion, and the accumulators oftentimes become money mad.

But the higher type of man plays the game, from start to finish, for the love of achievement; because it satisfies the sense of duty, of justice; plays it because it will make him a larger, completer man; because it satisfies his passion for expansion, for growth. He plays the game for the training it gives, for the opportunity of self-expression. He feels that he has a message to deliver to mankind, that he must deliver it like a man.

The tyranny of habit is also a powerful factor in keeping men going. The daily routine, the business or professional system, becomes a part of our very nature. When we have been going to our office or business at just such a time every morning, doing about the same things everyday for a quarter or half a century, any radical change—a sudden cessation of all these activities, a switching from the daily use of our strongest faculties to comparatively unused ones, is not a pleasant thing to contemplate, nor an easy thing to do.

Every normal man has a dread of the shrinking and shriveling which inevitably follow the change from an active to an inactive life. He dreads this because it is a sort of slow suicide, a gradual atrophy of a talent or power which had perhaps been the pride of his life.

There are a multitude of reasons why a man should not retire when he has a competence. A whole life, the grip of habit, which increases facility and desire every repetition; the strong ties of business or professional friendships, and, above all, the passion for conquest, for achievement, the love of the game, tend to keep him in it.

It is the love of forging ahead, of pushing out into new fields, which has grown to giant proportions in grand struggle for supremacy, the ambition to push on a little further, not greed or selfishness, that keeps the majority of men in harness.

The artist, the business, or professional man is much like the hunter, who will endure all sorts of hardships and probations in pursuit of game, but loses all interest in it the moment he bags it.

The love of achievement is satisfied in the very active creation, and the realization of the ideal which had haunted the brain. Ease, leisure, comfort, are nothing compared with the exhilaration which comes from achievement.

Who can describe the sense of triumph that fills the inventor, the joy that throws him when he sees for the first time the perfect mechanism or device—the work of his brain and hand—that will ameliorate the hard conditions of mankind and help to emancipate man from drudgery?

Who can imagine the satisfaction, the happiness of scientist who, after years of battling with poverty, criticism, and denunciation, and the tortures of being misunderstood by those dearest to him, when he succeeds at last in wrestling some great secret from nature, and making some marvelous discovery that will push civilization forward?

The struggle for supremacy—the conquest of obstacles, the mastery of nature, the triumph of ideals—has been the developer of man, the builder of what we call progress. It has brought out and broadened and strengthened the finest and noblest traits in human nature.

The idea that a man, whatever in his work in the world, should retire just because he has made enough money to live upon for the rest of his life is unworthy of a real man, who was made to create, to achieve, to go on conquering.

Every normal human being is born with a great sacred obligation resting upon him—to use his highest faculties as long as he can, and to give his best to the world; and the laws of his nature and of the universe are such that the more he gives to the world, the more he gets for himself—the larger, the completer man he becomes. But the moment he tries to sell himself to selfishness, to greed, to self-indulgence, the smaller, meaner man he becomes.

It is no wonder that the man who retires merely for selfish gratification is uneasy, unhappy, and is sometimes driven to suicide. He knows in his heart that it is wrong to withdraw his great productive, creative ability from a world which needs it so much; to let his achieving faculties atrophy from disuse. He knows that it is a sin against his own development, his own future possibilities, to seize the exercise of his godlike powers.

It is the wrestling with obstacles and the overcoming of difficulties that have made man a giant of achievement.

If we could analyze a strong, vigorous character, we should find it made up largely of the conquering habit, the habit of overcoming.

On the other hand, if we should analyze a weak character we should find just the reverse—the habit of failure, the habit of letting things slide, of yielding instead of conquering—the lack of courage, of persistency, of grit.

There is the same difference between a self-made young man, who has fought his way up to his own loaf, and the pampered youth who has never been confronted by a great responsibilities that would exercise his powers and call out his reserves, that there is between the stalwart oak which has struggled for its existence with a thousand storms, with all the extremities of the elements, and the hothouse plant which has never been allowed to feel a breath of frost or a rough wind.

Every bit of the oak’s fiber has registered a victory, so that when its timber is called upon to wrestle with storms and the fury of the sea, it says, “I am no stranger to the storm; I have met them many a time before. I feel within me stamina and fiber to resist the fury of any sea, because I have fought and overcome its equal a thousand times.”

The hothouse plant succumbs to the first adverse wind.

Responsibility is a powerful developing character that the idle, aimless person never gets the advantage of. Great responsibilities bring out great reserves to match them.

The consciousness of having a message for mankind that has held multitudes of people to their ideals, amidst suffering, hardships, and overwhelming difficulties.

Every normal human being is happiest as well as strongest when active, especially when doing that which he was intended to do, that which he is best fitted to do; when he is trying to make real division of his highest moment. He is weakest and most miserable when idle, or doing that which he is least fitted for by nature.

The divine discontent which all aspiring souls feel is a longing for growth, for a realization of possibilities. It is the call of the potencies within us to do, to be; the longing for that expansion and power which can only come from healthful, vigorous activity in pursuit of a worthy aim.

There is no mental tonic, no physical stimulus like that which comes from the consciousness of growing larger, fuller, completer each day in the pursuit of one's chosen work.

The passion for conquest, the conquering faculty which we all have—that something within us which aspires—becomes strong and powerful just in proportion as it has legitimate exercise and encouragement, so that every feeling out and stretching of the mind, every exercise of the faculty to-day makes a larger to-morrow possible.

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Isn’t he awesome? He’s become one of my favorites!

Here is one other crazy acquisition related to Success Magazine that I made this month. The cover of the Christmas issue of Success Magazine, 1900, was created by the famous artist, J. C. Leyendecker. He was one of the most prolific freelance commercial artists in the US between 1895 and 1951. He did 80 cover designs for Colliers Magazine and 322 for the Saturday Evening Post.

Before he would get the commission for a design, he would paint his vision, then pitch it to the magazine. If he would get the commission, then he would then go and design the actual cover. This painting I’m holding here is the ORIGINAL PAINTING of his concept for the Success Christmas cover, as well as a super rare copy of the actual cover!

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