They do not grasp circumstances and change them into opportunities.

They have no faculty of turning honest defeats into telling victories.

With ability enough, and time in abundance,--the warp and woof of success,--they are forever throwing back and forth an empty shuttle, and the real web of life is never woven.
If you ask one of them to state his aim and purpose in life, he will say: "I hardly know yet for what I am best adapted, but I am a thorough believer in genuine hard work, and I am determined to dig early and late all my life, and I know I shall come across something--either gold, silver, or at least iron." I say most emphatically, no.

Would an intelligent man dig up a whole continent to find its veins of silver and gold?
The man who is forever looking about to see what he can find never finds anything.

If we look for nothing in particular, we find just that and no more.