Acres of Diamonds is a book by Russell H. Conwell that was published in 1890 as a document of a lecture by the same name that he gave over 6,000 times to audiences all over world. The title derives from a story Conwell had heard from an Arab guide concerning a farmer so eager to find diamonds that he sold his land and went off to search for them in vain. In the meantime, the buyer of his property was fortunate to discover a diamond mine on the property. The central idea, of course, is that one need not search far and wide for opportunity; all that is necessary to achieve good things is present in one’s own community.  The lecture was first given in 1869 by Conwell to a reunion of the 46^th Massachusetts Regiment that had served in the Civil War. He continued to deliver the lecture on the Chautauqua circuit until his death in 1925.

From Russell Conwell's introduction...

Friends.—This lecture has been delivered under these circumstances: I visit a town or city, and try to arrive there early enough to see the postmaster, the barber, the keeper of the hotel, the principal of the schools, and the ministers of some of the churches, and then go into some of the factories and stores, and talk with the people, and get into sympathy with the local conditions of that town or city and see what has been their history, what opportunities they had, and what they had failed to do—and every town fails to do something—and then go to the lecture and talk to those people about the subjects which applied to their locality. "Acres of Diamonds"—the idea—has continuously been precisely the same. The idea is that in this country of ours every man has the opportunity to make more of himself than he does in his own environment, with his own skill, with his own energy, and with his own friends. RUSSELL H. CONWELL.

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