Ever faced a setback? Just felt like throwing up your hands and screaming “what’s the use?” OK, that may be a little dramatic but everyone at one time or another has had a setback or even just a bad day. The next time it happens to you here are a few stories about setbacks that inspired greatness!
Lucille Ball: She began studying to be an actress in 1927 and was told by the head instructor of the John Murray Anderson Drama School, “Try any other profession. Any other profession.”
Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds: In 1959 a Universal Pictures executive dismissed them at the same meeting with the following statements. To Burt Reynolds: “You have no talent.” To Clint Eastwood: You have a chip on your tooth, your adams apple sticks out to far and you talk to slow.”
Alexander Graham Bell: When he invented the telephone in 1876 it didn’t ring off the hook with calls from potential backers. After making a demonstration call then President Rutherford Hayes said “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?”
Chester Carlson: In the 1940’s this young inventor took his idea to 20 corporations, including some of the biggest in the country. They all turned him down. In 1947, after 7 long years of rejections, he finally got a tiny company in Rochester NY, the Haloid Company, to purchase the rights to his electronic paper-copying process. Haloid became Xerox Corporation and both it and Carlson became very rich.
Abraham Lincoln: He entered the Blackhawk war (1831-1832) as a captain. By the end of the war he had been demoted to the rank of private.
J.K. Rowling: Author of the Harry Potter series Joanne was an aspiring writer and single mother living on welfare with her young daughter in an unheated mice infested flat. Her first book was rejected by 12 publishers before the world met Harry Potter in 1997.
And then there was the young man who submitted a paper to his Yale University management professor and got this response: “The concept is interesting and well formed but in order to earn better than a C the idea must be feasible.” The young man was Fred Smith. His paper proposed reliable overnight delivery service. Fred went on to start FedEx Corp.
Failure is not falling down but staying down!
Comments(3)