Consider this.
Posted July 17, 2009
Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.
-Napoleon Hill
Consider this:
• Woody Allen-Academy award winning writer, producer and director-flunked motion picture production at New York University and the City College of New York. He also failed English at New York University.
• Leon Uris, author of the best seller Exodus, failed high school English 3 times.
• When Lucille Ball began studying to be an actress in 1927, she was told by the head instructor of the John Murray Anderson Drama School, " Try any other profession. Any other."
• In 1959, a Universal Pictures executive dismissed Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds 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." As you no doubt know, Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood went on to become big stars in the movie industry.
• In 1944, Emmeline Snively, director of the Blue Book Modeling Agency, told modeling hopeful Norma Jean Baker (Marilyn Monroe), "You'd better learn secretarial work or else get married."
• Liv Ullman, who was nominated two times for the Academy Awards for Best Actress, failed an audition for the state theatre school in Norway. The judges told her she had no talent.
• Malcolm Forbes, the late editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine, one of the most successful business publications in the world, failed to make the staff of the school newspaper when he was an under graduate at Princeton University.
• 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 the british rock group called The Beatles, one executive said, "We don't like their sound. Groups of guitars are on their way out."
• Paul Cohen, Nashville "Artist and Repertoire Man" for Decca Records, while firing Buddy Holly from the Decca label in 1956, called Holly "The biggest no-talent I ever worked with." Twenty years later Rolling Stone called Holly, along with Chuck Berry, "The major influence on the rock music of the sixties."
• In 1954, Jimmy Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opery, fired Elvis Presley after one performance. He told Presley, "You ain't goin' nowhere... son. You ought to go back to drivin' a truck." Elvis Presley went on to become the most popular singer in America.
• 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, "Thats an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?"
• When Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he tried over 2,000 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 2,000-step process."
• John Milton became blind at age 44. Sixteen years later he wrote the classic Paradise Lost.
• After having lost both legs in an air crash, British fighter Douglas Bader rejoined the British royal Air Force with two artificial limbs. During World War II he was captured by the Germans three times-and three times he escaped.
History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heart-breaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.
-B.C. Forbes
