Inspiring Stories

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 rythmic 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 and was declared the fastest woman in the world in 1960.

The above stories are inspiring and should make you introspect, experiment, try out many things and find out what you really like and enjoy doing. Experiment still further and that will take you on the road to excellence in whatever you enjoy doing. That becomes your identity and your character which only develops from your own persistence, through experience of trial and sometimes suffering, the character is strengthened, vision is cleared, ambition is inspired and success is achieved. Learn to look at fear and failure in the face and accept challenges to attempt to do the things that seems insurmountable.

A winner is not one who never fails, but one who never quits!

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