"] Well, I never took a great
interest in defeats. (Loud laughter and applause.) Now, as I said
before, I never was an athlete, although I have always led an outdoor
life, and have accomplished something in it, simply because my theory
is that almost any man can do a great deal, if he will, by getting the
utmost possible service out of the qualities that he actually
possesses.
There are two kinds of success. One is the very rare kind that comes
to the man who has the power to do what no one else has the power to
do. That is genius. I am not discussing what form that genius takes;
whether it is the genius of a man who can write a poem that no one
else can write, _The Ode on a Grecian Urn_, for example, or _Helen,
thy beauty is to me_; or of a man who can do 100 yards in nine and
three-fifths seconds. Such a man does what no one else can do. Only a
very limited amount of the success of life comes to persons possessing
genius. The average man who is successful,--the average statesman, the
average public servant, the average soldier, who wins what we call
great success--is not a genius. He is a man who has merely the
ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellows, but who has
developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree.
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