Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet.
Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared,
ambition inspired and success achieved.
You gain strength, experience and confidence by every experience where you really stop to look fear in the face....
You must do the thing you cannot do.
And remember, the finest steel gets sent through the hottest furnace.
In 1962,
four nervous young musicians played their first record audition for
the executives of the Decca recording Company. The executives were not
impressed. While turning down this group of musicians, one executive
said, "We don't like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out."
The group was called The Beatles.
In 1944,
Emmeline Snively, director of the Blue Book Modelling Agency, told modelling
hopeful Norma Jean Baker, "You'd better learn secretarial work or else
get married." She went on and became Marilyn
Monroe.
In 1954,
Jimmy Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, Fired a singer after one
performance. He told him, "You ain't goin' nowhere....son. You ought
to go back to drivin' a truck." He went on to become the most
popular singer in America named Elvis Presley.
When Alexander
Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, it did not ring
off the hook with calls from potential backers. After making a demonstration
call, President Rutherford Hayes said, "That's
an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?"
When Thomas
Edison invented the light bulb, he tried over 2000 experiments
before he got it to work. A young reporter asked him how it felt to
fail so many times. He said, "I never failed
once. I invented the light bulb. It just happened to be a 2000-step
process."
In the 1940s,
another young inventor named Chester Carlson
took his idea to 20 corporations, including some of the biggest in the
country. They all turned him down. In 1947 - after
seven long years of rejections! - he finally got a tiny company
in Rochester, New York, the Haloid Company, to purchase the rights to
his invention - an electrostatic paper-copying process.
Haloid became Xerox Corporation we know today.
Wilma
Rudolph was the 20th of 22 children. She was born prematurely
and her survival was doubtful. When she was 4 years old, she contacted
double pneumonia and scarlet fever, which left her with a
paralysed left leg. At age 9, she removed the metal leg brace
she had been dependent on and began to walk without it. By 13 she had
developed a rhythmic walk, which doctors said was a miracle. that same
year she decided to become a runner. She entered
a race and came in last. For the next few years every race
she entered, she came in last. Everyone told her to quit, but she
kept on running. One day she actually won a race. And then
another. From then on she won every race she entered. Eventually this
little girl, who was told she would never walk again, went
on to win three Olympic gold medals.