Acres of Diamonds

Conwell heard this story on the Tigris, from an old Arab guide hired in Baghdad to lead a party of travelers down the river. The guide told stories all day long, and Conwell, worn out by them, stopped listening. So the old man pulled off his Turkish cap and swung it in a circle until his passenger finally looked.

Then he announced that the next story was one he kept for his "particular friends." That got Conwell's attention, and it should get yours.

A tale saved for particular friends is not entertainment. It carries something the teller can't say to your face, so he wraps it in a story and lets you find it on your own. Conwell told this one more than five thousand times, and he always began with the guide and his swinging cap.

The hero is Ali Hafed, an ancient Persian who lived not far from the River Indus. He owned a very large farm, with orchards, grain-fields and gardens, and he had money out at interest. By any measure he was a rich man.

The guide adds something stranger. Ali Hafed "was contented because he was wealthy, and wealthy because he was contented."

Read the second half again. The obvious half is that money made him calm. The odd half is that contentment made him wealthy: a man at peace with his land keeps tending it, lends carefully and has no reason to gamble. The farm and the mood held each other up. So far, nothing in the story suggests a flaw in either.

One day a Buddhist priest, one of the wise men of the East, sat down by Ali Hafed's fire and talked about diamonds. A diamond the size of your thumb, he said, could buy the whole county. A mine of them could put your children on thrones.

That was the entire event. No blight hit the orchards. No debt came due. The grain was still standing in the fields when Ali Hafed went to bed.

What arrived that evening was a new thing to measure against. An hour earlier the farm was the biggest fact in his life. Now it sat beside a mine he had never seen, and beside that mine it looked small. The land had not shrunk. Only the yardstick had grown.

Ali Hafed went to bed a poor man on the night of the priest's visit. According to the story, what had actually changed?

• The priest showed him his farm was worthless
• His money at interest had been lost
• Nothing he owned, only how he saw it✓Correct answer
• A failed harvest had drained his savings

Conwell is explicit that Ali Hafed "had not lost anything." The orchards, fields and money were all still there; the talk of thumb-sized diamonds changed only the standard he measured them by.

Here is the sentence the whole parable turns on. Ali Hafed went to bed that night a poor man. "He had not lost anything, but he was poor because he was discontented, and discontented because he feared he was poor."

It is the first loop running backwards. Contentment and wealth used to feed each other. Now discontent and the fear of poverty feed each other, each giving the other a fresh reason. Poor because he feared he was poor is not a figure of speech. By morning he was ready to act exactly like a poor man.

You probably know the night he had. Someone mentions what a friend earns, or where a friend moved, and a life that felt fine at dinner feels thin at two in the morning. Ali Hafed told himself he wanted a mine of diamonds, and he lay awake until dawn.

It would be easy to pin the moral on wanting. A greedy farmer hears about diamonds, chases them and comes to grief, so stay satisfied with what you've got.

That is not Conwell's moral, and it couldn't be. The same lecture tells its audience it is their duty to get rich honestly, and calls the wish for money to do good with an honorable ambition. A preacher who said that was not going to scold a farmer for dreaming big.

Look at what the wish did instead. It didn't add a goal to Ali Hafed's life. It turned his farm into the thing standing between him and the goal. The problem is not the wish but what it did to the ground under his feet. Wanting diamonds was fine. Deciding that everything worth having lay somewhere else was the mistake.