Acres of Diamonds

This is not really a book. It is a lecture, and Conwell delivered it more than anything else he ever wrote, across what he described as fifty-seven years of public life. He said himself that it breaks the rules of oratory, that it was thrown together at random and spoken offhand, and that it succeeded where the lectures he laboured over failed.

It begins as a story he was told rather than one he made up. Travelling down the Tigris and Euphrates with a party of English travellers, he hired an old Arab guide in Bagdad who filled the days with tales. Conwell stopped listening to most of them. One he never forgot.

What is in the lecture

The story is of a Persian farmer, Al Hafed, who hears about diamonds, becomes discontented with a farm that had contented him the day before, sells it, and spends the rest of his life searching. He dies far from home with nothing. The man who bought the farm finds a diamond field in the stream running through the property.

Conwell's use of it is not subtle and is not meant to be. The material for a fortune, he tells each city he speaks in, is in that city, among those neighbours, in that trade. Not elsewhere. Not later. The thing you left in order to go looking for it was in the ground you already owned.

The practical instruction that follows is almost boringly concrete: study the people around you, find what they need and nobody is serving, and serve it. He treats money made that way as evidence that you did.

A long stretch answers the reader who believes it is more honourable to stay poor. Agree with him or not, it is the clearest statement of the argument that making money and doing good are the same activity, and it is why the lecture was as contested in its day as it is now.

Russell H. Conwell

Conwell was a Baptist minister in Philadelphia, and the founder and first president of Temple University. Temple publishes the lecture as the inspiration for the university's own mission, which tells you how the money he made from giving it thousands of times was used.

It was spoken long before it was ever printed, and it still moves like speech: direct address, digressions, a speaker reading the room. That makes it unusually good material to work through in conversation rather than in silence.