A friend came to me with a brilliant idea which required him resigning from his job and setting up a business. The scheme seemed good, and it was some years later I met him and found him still plodding on in his old job. “What happened?” I asked, “I thought you’d be a millionaire by now?”
“I didn’t do anything about it,” he said gloomily, “I wish I had, because someone else came up with it and he’s doing well!” “Why didn’t you?” I asked. “People put me off,” he said, “I talked to different people and they told me I was a fool!”
In 1913, Lee De Forest, inventor of the triode tube, was charged by the district attorney for using fraudulent means to mislead the public into buying stocks in his company, claiming he could transmit the human voice across the Atlantic. He was publicly humiliated and called a fraud for trying to cheat people. Can you imagine where we would now be without his invention?
A New York Times editorial on December 19, 1903 questioned the wisdom of the Wright Brothers who were trying to invent a machine, heavier than air that would fly. One week later, at Kitty Hawk, the Wright Brothers took their famous flight.
Colonel Sanders, at age 65, had assets of a beat-up car and a $100 check from Social Security. He remembered his mother’s fried chicken recipe and went out selling. It is estimated he knocked on more than a thousand doors before he got his first order. He was ridiculed by family and friends, but finally made a gigantic success of his company.
As a young cartoonist, Walt Disney faced many rejections from newspaper editors who said he had no talent. One day a minister at a church hired him to draw some cartoons. Disney was working out of a small rodent-infested shed near the church. Seeing a small mouse inspired him to draw a new cartoon. That was the start of Mickey Mouse. All these people decided to go for it despite others thinking it wouldn’t work. One day a partially deaf four-year-old child came home with a note in his pocket from his teacher, “Your Tommy is too stupid to learn, get him out of this school.”
His mother read the note and answered, “My Tommy is not too stupid to learn, I will teach him myself!” And that Tommy grew up to be the great Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison had only three months of formal schooling. Imagine what would have happened had the mother believed the teacher! So, if you have an idea or a dream, just go for it! Stop listening to those who tell you it will not succeed. It will, if like all the others you’ve just heard about, you go for it..!
