Patric J. Dufficy: Dealers in Hope

Yesterday evening, I found myself thinking about the difference between an employee (job borrower) and a business owner and I came up with a nice parallel. “Gold diggers”

Here’s a quick summary of the short lived gold rush that appended in the Klondike.
They estimate that about 100,000 people traveled to the Klondike Gold Rush between 1897 and 1899.

A large quantity of gold was discovered in the Klondikeon August 16^th 1896 and when the news reached Seattle and San Francisco in 1897, it triggered a “stampede” of wannabes prospectors.
The journey to the Klondike was tough and people had to travel long distances and cross difficult mountain passes while carrying heavy loads of equipment. Some of them discovered very rich deposits of gold and became immensely wealthy. But, the majority arrived too late, the best of the gold fields was already claimed and roughly 4,000 miners eventually struck gold. The Klondike Gold Rush ended in 1899, after gold was discovered in Nome, Alaska, prompting a mass departure from the Klondike.

100,000 persons seem like a big amount of people who had the guts to take this huge challenge, but with more than 70,000,000 inhabitants in the United States alone in 1897, it was only 0.14% of the US population (1/7 of a percent).

So what are the similarities between the Gold Rush days and our days?
Only a tiny percentage of people decided to roll up their sleeves and follow a dream no matter what. They surely had a ton of opposition from their friends and families about their bold project, but they had a goal stronger than anything else.
Ultimately, only around 4% of the 100,000 became wealthy in this adventure, but what if some in that 4% had backed-up on their dream saying, “They’re right… It’s a fool plan… It will be too difficult, almost impossible.”? They would never have known what life they could have lived.
If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time. (Zig Ziglar)

Many employees are thinking like those who never went in search of gold. They think they are not fit for success in business and it’s too much work without any guarantee it will work in the end. Working for someone else and have a weekly assured income is not as risky, but it will rarely bring extraordinary results.

In the end, some will be ready to kneel in a river and look for gold, possibly searching for a long time before they even discover their first gold bit, while the others will rather ask the prospectors if they want to hire them to carry their gold in exchange of a microscopic percentage of the benefits.

Thanks for reading, Patric J. Dufficy

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