852 THE PRINCIPLES OF PERSONAL INTEGRITY
lesson. There is a great and lasting lesson in every reversal and in every
defeat, and usually it is a lesson that could be learned in no other way.
Defeat often talks to us in a language that we do not understand.
If this were not true, we would not make the same mistakes over and
over again without profiting by the lessons that they might teach us.
If it were not true, we would observe more closely the mistakes that
other people make and we would profit by them also.SEVEN TURNING POINTS
Perhaps I can best help you to interpret the meaning of defeat by
taking you back over some of my own experiences covering a period
of approximately thirty years. Seven different times within this period
I have come to the turning point that the uninformed call failure. At
each one of these seven turning points I thought I had been a dismal
failure, but now I know that what looked to be a failure was nothing
more than a kindly, unseen hand that halted me in my chosen course
and with great wisdom forced me to redirect my efforts along more
advantageous pathways.
I realized this, however, only after I had taken a retrospective view
of my experiences and had analyzed them in the light of many years
of meditative thought.First Turning Point
After finishing a course at a business college, I took a job as a steno-
grapher and bookkeeper, a position that I held for the next five
years. As a result of having practiced the habit of performing more
work and better work than that for which I was paid, as described in
Lesson Nine, I advanced rapidly until I was assuming responsibilities
and receiving a salary far out of proportion to my age. I saved my
money, and my bank account amounted to several thousand dollars.
My reputation spread rapidly and found competitive bidders for