Adversity

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 Modeling
Agency told modeling 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