Great Here, or Nowhere — Acres of Diamonds

An injured Massachusetts nail-worker, reduced to erasing pencil marks in an office, ties a piece of rubber to a stick to save his tired hand; his daughter points out he has essentially made a patent, and the resulting rubber-tipped pencil design earns him a fortune from an invention that required no capital at all. Conwell pivots to what he calls the heart of his entire argument: Philadelphia lags behind cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco not for lack of resources but because its own residents habitually talk down every local improvement, boulevard, or piece of legislation before it can succeed.

He then dismantles two young men's definitions of greatness. One believes he will be great only once elected to political office; Conwell counters that in a country ruled by the people, officeholders are servants, not masters, and that greatness must exist in a person before any office can reveal it, or the office becomes an empty performance. Another imagines becoming great through future battlefield heroics.

Conwell undercuts military glory directly with the story of the USS Merrimac at Santiago, where Lieutenant Hobson receives all the public credit while seven other men on the same mission, equally exposed to danger, go essentially unnamed and unremembered by the public that celebrates the mission. He closes with General Robert E. Lee's servant Rastus, who jokes that he survived the war by staying safely back with the generals whenever fighting broke out, a small joke that quietly reinforces Conwell's larger point about who actually bears the real risk versus who receives the credit.