Acres of Diamonds: The Story and What It Teaches Presenters

Most people hear this story from someone else. A sermon, a sales conference, a motivational speaker who used it to make a point about opportunity. The version that gets passed around is usually a sentence long: the riches were under his feet the whole time.

That version is accurate, and it misses almost everything interesting about it.

Here is the story Russell Conwell actually told, and what I think it really means, which is not quite what people usually take it to mean.

The story

Ali Hafed was an ancient Persian who owned a large farm near the River Indus. He had orchards, grain fields, and gardens; money at interest; and a family. Conwell is specific about his state of mind before anything happens. In Conwell’s words, he was “contented because he was wealthy, and wealthy because he was contented.”

One evening a Buddhist priest visited and told him about diamonds. He described how they formed and what a handful would be worth. A diamond, he said, was a congealed drop of sunlight.

That night, Ali Hafed went to bed a poor man. Nothing had been taken from him. He had simply heard about something he did not have.

The next morning, he asked the priest where to find diamonds. He was told to look for white sands between high mountains. So, he sold his farm, collected his money, left his family with a neighbour, and went looking.

He searched the Mountains of the Moon. He searched Palestine. He wandered into Europe. The money ran out, and he stood at last in rags on the shore of a bay in Barcelona, having found nothing at all. Conwell’s telling has him take his own life there.

Meanwhile, back on the farm, the man who had bought it from him led his camel out to drink at the garden brook. In the shallow water he noticed a flash of light in the white sands and pulled out a black stone.

It was a diamond. The same brook, the same sands, the same few acres Ali Hafed had walked across every day of his adult life, turned out to be the diamond mine of Golconda.

Is it true?

No, and Conwell never claims it is. He says an old Arab guide told him while they were travelling down the Tigris and Euphrates, and that he only half-listened until the guide swung his cap to get his attention. Ali Hafed is a teaching device rather than a historical figure, though Golconda was a real and famous source of diamonds.

It is also worth noting that the version most people have heard isn’t this one. Over a century of retelling, the Persian farmer became an African farmer, and the Buddhist priest became rumours of neighbours striking it rich. If your memory of the story does not match the above, that is why.

The detail almost everybody leaves out

The usual retelling starts with a poor farmer who dreams of riches. That is not the story.

Conwell’s farmer is already wealthy, already settled, already content. He does not lose his farm through misfortune or bad judgement. He gives it away, freely, the morning after a stranger describes something better.

That is the hinge of the whole parable, and it is the part that gets dropped, probably because it is less comfortable than the version about opportunity. Poverty did not undo Ali Hafed. He was undone by comparison.

What it is usually taken to mean

That opportunity is closer than you think. That you should look at what is in front of you before you go chasing what is somewhere else. Conwell lectured audiences all over America, and he would end by telling them they had acres of diamonds right where they stood.

That reading is fair, and it is useful. It is also only half of what the story does.

What I think it actually means

The farm did not change. The diamonds were in that brook the entire time Ali Hafed owned it, and he probably walked past them daily for years.

So the story isn’t really about opportunity. It is about attention. Ali Hafed never lacked resources. It was the ability to see what was in front of him, because from the evening the priest visited, his attention was fixed on something else entirely.

That is a more useful lesson than the motivational one, and a less comfortable one, because resources are somebody else’s to give and attention is not.

Which brings me to presenting

I have spent fifteen years in rooms with people preparing to speak, and the same thing happens in almost all of them.

People arrive convinced they need something they don’t have. A better voice. More charisma. The confidence of whoever spoke last month. The style of someone they watched online. They are quite certain that the thing that will make them good is elsewhere, in somebody else’s possession, and that until they acquire it they will have to make do.

Like Ali Hafed, what they actually need is sitting in the ground they are standing on.

Here are three of them.

1. What you already know

The single most persuasive thing in any presentation is the part only you could have said. The time it went wrong. The client who told you something you have never forgotten. The number that surprised you when you first saw it.

Most people strip exactly that out, because it feels unprofessional or too personal or not important enough. They replace it with material anybody could have assembled, and then wonder why the room is polite rather than interested.

You do not have to go and find this. You already have years of it. The work is remembering that it counts.

Try this: before you build anything, write down three things you have personally seen that are relevant to your subject. Not statistics. Things that happened. At least one of them belongs in the talk.

2. The way you actually speak

Watch somebody prepare for an important presentation, and you will often watch them become a slightly worse version of themselves. The vocabulary goes formal. The sentences get longer. The warmth leaves the voice. They decide their normal way of speaking isn’t good enough for the occasion.

It almost always was. The way you explain something to a colleague over coffee is usually clearer, more direct and more convincing than anything you will write for a slide, because it was built for a person rather than for an audience.

Try this: explain your main point out loud to one person who is not involved, as though you were telling them about it rather than presenting it. Record it on your phone. The phrasing you used there is usually better than the phrasing you were planning to use.

3. Why you care

Nobody can give you this one, and no technique substitutes for it.

Somewhere in the subject is the reason it matters to you. Not the reason it matters to the business, which is on the slide already, but why you personally think this is worth an hour of other people’s lives. If you cannot find it, you need to know that before you stand up, because an audience detects the absence long before they can tell you what is missing.

Try this: finish the sentence “the reason this matters is” without using a single word from your own industry. If the answer does not move you even slightly, the room will not be moved either.

The one thing that is genuinely hard

None of the above helps much if you are frightened, and a great many capable people are. That is a subject of its own rather than a paragraph in a parable, and I have written about what actually helps with presentation nerves separately.

The same principle applies here. What you need is already yours, in your own breathing and your own attention, but having something and knowing how to use it are two different things, and nobody is born knowing. Ali Hafed’s buyer still had to notice the stone in the sand and take it to somebody who could tell him what it was.

The point of the story

Ali Hafed’s tragedy was not that he failed to find diamonds. It is that he was looking in the first place.

He had a farm, a family, enough money, and a settled mind, and he traded it all for the possibility of something he had been told other people had. The diamonds in the brook are almost a detail. The real loss came the night he decided what he had wasn’t enough.

If you are preparing to speak and you are certain you need something you do not have, it is worth asking what you are standing on.

If you would like some help finding it:

– Book yourself onto a powerful public speaking course.

– Invest in some really good one to one public speaking coaching.

– Get yourself some excellent presentation skills training.

If this was useful, pass it on to somebody who is about to go looking somewhere else.