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A winner is NOT
one who NEVER FAILS, but one
who NEVER QUITS!
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 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 see 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 7 long years of
rejections, he finally got a tiny company in Rochester, NY, the
Haloid Company, to purchase the rights to his invention -- an electrostatic
paper-copying process. Haloid became Xerox Corporation.
A little girl - the 20th of 22 children,
was born prematurely
and her survival was doubtful. When she was 4 years old, she
contracted 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 - Wilma
Rudolph, went on to win three Olympic gold medals.
A school teacher scolded a boy for not paying
attention to
his mathematics and for not being able to solve simple problems.
She told him that you would not become anybody in life. The boy
was Albert Einstein.
Back in 1932 was out of a job and
broke, and his wife was expecting a baby. Although he was a heating
engineer, there were no jobs available and Darrow and his wife were
just barely subsisting on the few odd jobs he could get as a handyman.
Things were bleak. Fate didn't reckon
with the courage of this man and his wife, however.They laughed
at it, literally. In the evenings, to take their minds off their
troubles, they made a little game in which they could pretend they
were millionaires, recalling pleasant vacations in nearby Atlantic
City. They reconstructed the area adjoining the boardwalk. Darrow
carved hotels and houses out of small pieces of wood, and they called
the game Monopoly. Three years later, in 1935 the game was marketed
by Parker Brothers, and Darrow and his wife became millionaires
because they allowed adversity to make them instead of break them.

When you face adversity, are you going to
allow it to break you
or make you? It's your choice
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