Struggle for Life & Struggle for Success

If you ask any man in America, or any man in business in the England, what it is the most interferes with his enjoyment of exercise, he will say: ‘the struggle for life.’ He will say this in all sincerity; he will believe it. In a certain sense it is true yet us other and that a very important sense, it is profoundly false. The struggle for life is a think which does, of course, occur. It may to any of us if we are unfortunate. It occurred, for example, to Conrad’s hero Falk, who found himself on a derelict ship, one of the two men among the crew who were possessed of fire-arms, with nothing to eat but the other men, when the two men had finished the meals upon which they could agree, a true struggle for life began. Falk won, but was ever after a vegetarian.

Now that is not what the businessman means when the speaks of the ‘struggle for life.’ It is an inaccurate phrase which he has picked up in order to give dignity to something

essentially trivial. Ask him how many men he has known in his class of life have died of hunger. Ask him what happened to his friends after they had been ruined. Everybody knows that a businessman who has been ruined is better of a far as material comforts are concerned than a man who has never been rich enough to have the chance of being ruined. What people mean, therefore, by the struggle for life is really the struggle for success. What people fear when they engaged, in the struggle is not that they will fail to get their breakfast next morning, but that they will fail to outshine their neighbors.