On June 12, 1859, two Irish prospectors named Patrick McLaughlin and Peter O'Riley were working a placer claim at the head of Six-Mile Canyon, in the dry hills of what would become Nevada. They were after gold dust. What kept slowing them down was a heavy, blue-black mud that clogged their rocker and stuck to their shovels.

A local character named Henry Comstock rode up, talked his way into a share of the claim, and the whole deposit ended up wearing his name. None of them knew yet what they were standing on.

A sample of that troublesome blue mud crossed the mountains to an assay office in Grass Valley, California. The report came back staggering. The stuff they had been cursing and shoveling aside was loaded with silver, worth thousands of dollars a ton.

The surface gold played out fast. The real vein dove underground, wider and deeper than anything American miners had ever worked before.

Going down meant solving problems nobody had solved. The ground was soft, and the ore bodies were so wide that ordinary timbering buckled under them. Water rose from below at scalding hot temperatures. At depth the air was thin and the heat dropped strong men where they stood from exhaustion.

So they engineered their way down. A young German engineer named Philipp Deidesheimer designed square-set timbering, interlocking cubes of wood that could be stacked in any direction and packed with waste rock, holding open chambers the old methods could never support. Massive pumps lifted the hot water out. Hoisting works ran day and night.

The desert canyon became Virginia City, and the Comstock Lode poured out hundreds of millions of dollars in silver and gold over the next two decades estimated around $500 Million. The workings eventually reached thousands of feet below the surface, and the miners, assayers, and contractors trained in those shafts carried their methods to new mines across the West. The fortune never sat on the surface. It waited for the people willing to build a way down to it.

One silver rich part of the claim was the part everyone wanted out of the way.

That is worth sitting with and reflecting on in our own lives, wouldn’t you agree?

Napoleon Hill spent more than twenty years interviewing over five hundred of America's most accomplished builders, a project Andrew Carnegie set him on when Hill was a young reporter with no money and no connections. He did not find superior talent at the center of those lives. He found people who kept working through the stretch that convinced everyone else to turn back. Temporary defeat feels final from the inside. Hill's life's work says it is usually the price of admission to the part that pays.