OPPORTUNITIES NEVER END
A young American, Dewitt Wallace (1889–1981), decided to publish a monthly digest. He asked his father for $300 as starting capital. But his father refused, saying Dewitt didn’t know how to handle money and would waste it. Somehow, Dewitt managed to borrow a small amount from his brother, and in January 1920 he printed a sample issue with only a few hundred copies.
Then Dewitt faced another challenge. He showed his magazine to New York publishing houses and asked them to distribute it. But all of them refused, saying the magazine was “too serious” and that no market existed for such a publication.
This was a critical obstacle, because magazines usually reached readers through publishing houses—and they had all turned him down. Yet one possibility still remained for Dewitt: reaching buyers directly. He gathered addresses and began writing letters to people. At the same time, he placed advertisements in newspapers. Normally, it would have seemed impossible for a new, unknown magazine to gain subscribers this way. But Dewitt introduced one clever idea that turned the impossible into possible. In his letters and advertisements, he included this offer:
“The subscription could be cancelled and all money refunded if the reader wasn’t satisfied.”
The result was that subscription requests and money orders began to arrive. Right from the start, he collected enough money to publish two issues without difficulty.
Dewitt’s plan worked. Not a single person cancelled, and no one asked for a refund. He increased his efforts to reach more readers. By February 1922, his magazine had reached a circulation of one thousand. From there it kept growing, and by 1987 it was publishing more than 28 million copies, in 15 languages, across 139 editions. This was the magazine the world now knows as Reader’s Digest. It became the most widely read magazine in the world. By 1980, Dewitt and his wife had a fortune of fifty billion dollars.
Dewitt won subscribers by making his magazine, in effect, “risk-free.” Anyone could subscribe without fear of losing money. But this strategy only worked because of another factor: quality. Without quality, the first idea would only have led to failure.
This second factor was maintaining high standards—producing a magazine so well-prepared that readers felt it was truly worth their money, and wanted to continue subscribing.
To achieve this, Dewitt worked extremely hard. His magazine was a digest—a selection of published articles. To prepare these selections, Dewitt read more than forty magazines every day, some bought and others in libraries. This exhausting work even drew mockery; many people dismissively called him a “scissors-and-paste editor.” But he ignored the criticism and kept going.
Dewitt Wallace’s biographer summed up the secret of his success in these words:
“What made him supernormal was his intense, sustained curiosity, plus an unequalled capacity for work.”
One of his friends also said of him:
“He listens far more than he talks.”
This story shows that the world is full of opportunities and possibilities—so many that the list never ends. Whenever one possibility is blocked, a person must immediately look for another. If he does, he will find that even where circumstances seem to guarantee failure, a new and greater possibility is waiting—one that can once again lead him to success.
