If you have been an upright man--and without this there can be no permanent success of any kind--your long residence in your community has put you to no disadvantage, but precisely the contrary. You have, during these years, secured the confidence of your community. They know you to be loyal, truthful, sober, steadfast, industrious. This popular faith in the elemental qualities of your character is the foundation of success, and usually it requires years to establish that.
You are at no disadvantage because the people do not have for you that admiration which the doing of things compels. The fact that your neighbors do not suspect your potentialities is really an advantage. If you have that righteous and permissible craft which every man should have, and if you take advantage of it, you can begin the work which will bring you success without that envy and competition, that friction of jealousy, which every man of acknowledged power arouses. But if you, a man of fifty or over, go into a new environment, you carry with you that heaviest of all burdens, the necessity of making explanations.
"Why have you come among us at your age?" the people ask. "What is the story of your past?" they very properly inquire. "It must be that you are not a man of integrity which commanded the respect and support of your old home," they will not unnaturally conclude; "either this, or else you were a failure there."
These are the two necessary and inevitable deductions, and either horn of that cruel dilemma of logic is enough to impale you. If you escape them, you do it because you do not attract notice, and this, in itself, is failure. And in any event, to gain the substantial confidence of the people you must spend several years of right living among them. And you have no time to waste in building up confidence at your period of life. That is an asset which your whole career of unsuccessful probity should have accumulated for you; and it is dissipated if you remove from among those in whose minds that belief in you exists.
I have seen this serious error made so many times, and nearly always with such destroying results, that I give it more space than its relative proportion deserves. I have in mind now two men who did precisely this thing. Their success in the two country towns where they had lived had been reasonable, but not considerable. It did not appear to be success at all to them, though.