Next time you’re down and out and filled with doubt, this list from Hans deJong might provide a little perspective on success and failure.
– Albert Einstein was four years old before he could speak.
– Isaac Newton did poorly in grade school.
– Beethoven’s music teacher once said of him: ‘As a composer, he is hopeless’.
– When Thomas Edison was a boy, his teacher told him he was too stupid to learn anything.
– Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.
– Winston Churchill failed the 6th grade.
– Steven Spielberg dropped out of high school.
– Sam Walton’s (Wal-Mart) first store failed.
– Henry Ford suffered an early bankruptcy.
– Walt Disney was fired from an ad agency because he couldn’t draw.
– Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman were both voted ‘least likely to succeed’ at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. They went on to win two Oscars apiece.
– Sally Jessy Raphael was fired 18 times from showbiz jobs. She tried out for 134 commercial voice-overs and never got a single one. She eventually became a very successful talk-show host and garnered two Emmy awards.
– A young actor named Archibald Leach was rejected by Paramount Studios because he had a thick neck and was bowlegged. He later became the movie star Cary Grant.
– Clark Gable worked hard to get a screen test, only to be turned down by producer Darryl Zanuck, who shouted in Gable’s presence: ‘His ears are too big. He looks like an ape.’
– After an aspiring author sent her manuscript to a publisher, an editor called her writing ‘painfully dull, inept, clumsy, undisciplined, rambling, and thoroughly amateurish.’ The book, ‘Valley of the Dolls’, by Jacqueline Susann, sold nearly 29 million copies.
