Inspiring Stories of Persistence!
At age eighteen, she was kicked out of dramatic arts school in New York City after only a few weeks. Her drama teachers told her, “you have no future at all as a performer...you are too shy to put your best foot forward.” She tried to work as a model, and was just starting to be successful when she developed rheumatoid arthritis, and was unable to work for two years.
However, she was apparently persistent, because you know her name and her fame: Lucille Ball. I am curious: What did Lucy say to herself when she was told she had no talent? How did she carry on after a devastating illness?
Here’s another puzzle: This rock band was turned down by a major recording company, whose executives scornfully said, “we don’t like their sound and besides, guitar music is on the way out”.
You’ve heard of the band: The Beatles.
What did the young, struggling Beatles say to themselves when “experts” criticized them?
A fifteen-year-old boy was cut from his high school varsity sophomore basketball team. Despondent, he went home, locked himself in his room and cried.
You’ve heard of him: super star basketball player Michael Jordan, who certainly kept working at his basketball skills, and who said, “ I’ve failed over and over in my life. That’s why I succeed.”
Napoleon Hill, the great motivational teacher and writer, who made a careful study of how successful people think, said, "Most great people have achieved their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure."
A young man was fired from his newspaper job. His bosses told him that he “lacked imagination and had no original ideas”. Later on the young man had a crazy, never-before-attempted entertainment idea and took his business proposal to over fifty banks. He was turned down by all but the last bank. That young man was Walt Disney.
Many people have a habit of telling lies to themselves. One of the big lies is, “I am a failure. I can’t do that”.
It’s a lie because it isn’t true. Just because you have had a setback or a failure does not mean you cannot eventually succeed, whether your project is reducing weight, starting your own business, or writing a book, which reminds me ...
While staring out the window on a train trip, a young woman got an idea for a novel, but she didn’t make a start on it because her mother soon died and the young woman broke up with her husband. Soon she was diagnosed with clinical depression, and contemplated suicide. As a single mother on welfare with a fussy baby who would sleep if she was walked in the stroller, the woman finally began work on the novel. Sitting in local cafes, while the baby napped beside her, she scribbled. Finally, she submitted her little novel to twelve publishing houses, all of which rejected the manuscript. A year later she was finally accepted by Bloomsbury, a small British publishing house in London, England. The woman is Joanne Murray but you know her as multi-millionaire author, J.K. Rowling, and that first book of hers was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Persistence in the face of failures and setbacks is a familiar trait in successful people. How persistent are you?
As serendipity would have it, on the same day that I had started writing this article for you, I ran into my daughter’s former English teacher, a published author. I didn’t mention my article, but as we chatted, she mentioned that ‘persistence” is very important for writers, who get many more rejections than acceptances! (And then I mentioned my article, because I love “coincidences”!)
Even if you are not a writer, persistence is important for your success in anything you wish to achieve. Sure, you know that already. But what can you do about it? How can you increase your persistence? How do you get the skills that underlie persistence? Are you are thinking, right now, of someone you love who could use this?
Winston Churchill said, “never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never, in nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”
He knew what he was talking about. At age twelve, Winston failed the sixth form in public school and had to repeat a grade. Can you imagine the name-calling he was subjected to by his schoolmates? Then he failed the entrance exam to get into college. Twice! Later on he was defeated in his first election for Parliament. Luckily for Britain, he was persistent!
My friend and colleague, Dr. George De Sau, a clinical psychologist, says that it is important to remind you that it is not necessary or required to believe that you have to fail before you can succeed! It’s just a fact of life that “instant” success is a Hollywood idea, not a real-life happening.
What is the opposite of “success”?
The opposite is not “failure”.
Fear and inaction are the opposite of success.
If you can teach yourself to respond to failures and setbacks with persistence plus intelligent action, you’re headed for success!
That lie you may tell yourself, “I am a failure at that. I can’t do it,” is a kind of mental software that you are running in your biocomputer brain.
Perhaps you’ve tried to diet and ended up fatter, and the mental software you run is: “I am a failure. I can’t do it. Diets don’t work for me”.
Trying to stop running the Failure Software is like shouting curses at your computer when you get a computer virus. It won’t solve the problem, and it will wake up the cat.
What if instead you learned how to reprogram yourself with new mental software about persistence and courage? What if you got rid of the Lie Software Virus? This is best done in a state of mind associated with Alpha and Theta brainwave activity, as opposed to the Beta brainwave state, which is where you spend your waking hours. How do you do Alpha/Theta? That’s a skill that you learn with us in the DynaMIND® Course.
Intelligent action goes along with persistence. Lucille Ball took intelligent action. She needed knowledge and skill, so she continued to study dance, speech, and drama. She got better at it. She became a great comic actress and, as head of Desilu, her production company, she became the most powerful woman in Hollywood.
John, Paul, George, and Ringo took intelligent action. They worked hard to build their skills as musicians and songwriters. In his book about talent, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says that great talents have to put in about ten thousand hours of practice to build their skills. The Beatles completed their ten thousand hours playing in strip clubs in Hamburg, Germany, performing for six and eight hour stretches every day for more than a year.
How can you take intelligent action? Recently we had a fifteen-year-old girl with us in DynaMIND® class. She was scheduled to participate in her first high school debate competition in just a couple of days. She used a DynaMIND® mental technique called Alpha Rehearsal to prepare herself for the debate, learning and practicing her self-confidence, her facts, and her phrasing. As often happens when you are in an Alpha state, she even gained advance intuitive perception about the positions her opponents would take against her, and she created and rehearsed her devastating responses. She programed herself that she would “glow”. Then off she went to the debate, and won! One of the judges described her as “radiant”.
You too, can use the technique of Alpha Rehearsal to prepare yourself for better performance in any skill.
Perhaps you hate your job and decide to take professional training to change careers. Yikes! Immediately you might start running your old grade-school mental software, such as “I am only a C student. Studying is hard. I hate tests and exams”. Although you’re forty-five, and taking the real estate course, you can make yourself feel like you’re a sniveling grade three goof once again! Is this useful? No! Instead you’ll use your DynaMIND® toolkit to reprogram yourself for confidence and persistence, and for Alpha soak-it-up-like-a-sponge Learning.
What do you dream of achieving now in your life? Have you allowed setbacks or failures to take you off track, so far?
Marianne Williamson says it beautifully:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
You are capable of far more than you can imagine. I challenge you to to do something about it. After all, who is going to write the new books, heal the sick, start the new businesses, make the discoveries, raise the kids, generate the new wealth, design the starships, if not someone just like you?
-Janet MacDonald Kramer
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