HOW MANY FAILURES DOES IT TAKE TO BE A SUCCESS?

You may have read or heard some of these before, but like good green vegetables, you probably can’t get too many of them in your mental diet. I find them refreshing and encouraging, inspiring and amusing. They help me breathe a sigh of relief, and they lighten my load. They free me up when I start wanting to feel sorry for myself. They help put life in perspective. They help prevent whining.    

Henry Ford had five businesses that failed before he started a successful car business.

RH Macy had seven failed businesses before he opened Macy’s department store.

Soichiro Honda applied for a job as an engineer with Toyota, was rejected, and was unemployed for months before starting Honda Motor Company.

Akio Morita, founder of Sony, designed a rice cooker as his first product. It burned rice and was a total flop.

Colonel Sanders had his chicken recipe rejected hundreds of times before he opened Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor for lack of imagination.

Lucille Ball was considered very unpromising by her drama teachers and was advised to look for another line of work. Early in her career she was considered a B actress, at best.

Most of Emily Dickenson’s poems remained in her desk drawer during her lifetime. 

Helen Keller, well, you know about her.

John Lennon was dyslexic (dyslexia: has a hard time with words. Ha!).

Einstein was considered slow as a child.

He didn’t speak till he was four.

He couldn’t get a job at any university at the time he wrote four of the most important physics papers ever written by anyone, anywhere, at any time. 

Darwin’s father was very unimpressed with his young son’s intellectual abilities. (Way to go, dad!)

Isaac Newton failed at running the family farm before his uncle sent him to Cambridge.

In his day, Socrates was labeled an immoral corruptor of youth.

Edison failed at least a 1000, if not 10,000 times, designing a damned light bulb that would work.

The Wright Brothers suffered numerous failed attempts at making a plane that would fly, which only made their depression worse.

Mark Victor Hansen went bankrupt and wanted to kill himself before starting The Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books with Jack Canfield that sold over 100 million copies.

Lincoln suffered from depression and failed throughout his life, until he didn’t. 

Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade. He went walking the black dog, his code words for depression, quite often.  

Oprah Winfrey was fired from her job as a television reporter, since she was unfit for t.v.

Harry Truman went bankrupt before becoming president.

Jerry Seinfeld froze during his first performance and was booed off stage.

Fred Astaire: “Can’t act, can’t sing, can dance a little,” comments from his first audition.

Hollywood studios initially rejected Charlie Chaplin as too nonsensical.

After his first film, executives told Harrison Ford he didn’t have what it takes to be a star.

Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime, to a friend, for not much money.

Beethoven’s teachers thought he was hopeless.

A crowd ran the composer Igor Stravinsky out of town after his debut performance.

Mozart was dismissed from his position as a court musician.

Jack London’s first story was rejected over 500 times.

During his lifetime, Claude Monet was mocked as an artist.

Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, was rejected 30 times, so he threw it in the trash.

Steven Spielberg was rejected by USC film school.

Charles Schultz was turned down for a job by Walt Disney. Schultz later created Peanuts.

27 Publishers turned down Dr. Seuss’s first book.

“The colossus of independence”, John Adams, second president of the United States, “who was learned beyond all but a few,” suffered from self-doubt.

 Elvis Presley was told to go back to truck driving.

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.

And so on.

The lesson I walk away with from these examples is that most of us are not failing enough. We’re playing it safe. We’re picking up our toys and sulking off to our rooms before we’ve even given the game our best shot, and then our next, and our next, and our next until we break through to the place where we are gifting the world with what we have to offer.

            Another word for a failure is a mistake. A mistake is a mis-take, a shot that didn’t take, a shot that didn’t quite make it into the basket. So take a shot, and then another, and then another. Learn something each time, like Edison did, like Lucille Ball did. Miss as many shots as it takes until you start sinking them, because that’s what it takes, even if you’re Michael Jordan, Lucille Ball, or Abraham Lincoln.

            So go out there and fall on your face. Get it over with. Do it again and again.
            If you really want to live, you’ve got to fail. If you really want to learn how to shot, you’ve got to go out there and miss a few shots—or a few thousand shots.   
            There’s no other way.
            But there is a way.
            So get on the court and keep playing.
            And enjoy the game.

For coaching or SE sessions please contact me at 805/680-5572 or drjohnluca@gmail.com

MICHAEL VICK SUCCESS LESSONS

If you’re a sports fan, or live above ground, you probably know the story of the NFL quarterback, Michael Vick, who was thrown out of the NFL a few years ago and sent to United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth for breeding, fighting, and ultimately killing dogs. I was not familiar with the details of Vick’s story until after last Monday night’s football game when Vick played what some consider to be the best game played by a quarterback in NFL history

When the Atlanta Falcons first signed him, Vick was the most highly paid player in the NFL. He was described as ‘electrifying.’ His ten-year contract was worth $130 million dollars.

The guy could throw, and the guy could run. I mean he could really throw, and he could really run. When you see footage of his running game, you feel sorry for the defensive team. Vick could outmaneuver half a dozen guys like the Roadrunner could outmaneuver Wiley Coyote, a pile of dynamite, a shotgun, and an avalanche. Vick made his opponents look like they were on drugs. With his wild life-style, and his showing-up-last and leaving-first attitude towards practice, you could imagine some people might have wished the cocky s.o.b. would be brought down.

But, like in a Shakespearean Tragedy, it was Vick who brought himself down.

Dog fighting, of all things. Beating dogs. Electrocuting dogs. Shooting dogs. Eight dogs were found buried on Vick’s farm in Virginia where he ran a dog-fighting operation. Some dogs had been hung. Some had been drowned after surviving being hung. It was bad.

His fans, his family, his team, and the league were shocked and outraged.

People said he was a psychopath, a freak, a sick savage.

“My whole life was a lie,” Vick would say later.

He was thrown out of the NFL. He lost his contract. He went bankrupt. He sat in Leavenworth prison for two years.

            But he came back. After spending two years in prison and losing everything he had, Michael Vick worked his way back into society. He became a spokesman for the Humane Society. He repeatedly accepted responsibility for what he had done, and said he was sorry. He was given a second chance. He was signed by the Philadelphia Eagles, and last Monday night Michael Vick quarterbacked a fifty-nine-point game that started with him throwing an 88-yard touchdown pass on the first play.

            “Whom do you blame for all this?” he was asked on Sixty Minutes after he got out of prison.

“I blame myself,” he said.

In prison, he said he felt shame, guilt, and he said he cried.

“You cried?” he was asked. “Yes,” Vick answered. “I cried. For what I did to those animals, for what I did to my family. I let them down…when I think about it…it sickens me to my stomach.”

When asked if it was losing his contract and being thrown out of the NFL that he was most sorry for, Vick responded, “I deserved to lose everything. I lied to everybody. I was a living example of what not to do.” 

In another interview, his former head coach, Jim Mora, asked him, “Did I miss something? Was there something I could have done?”

Vick shook his head and answered, “No. The best thing for me…crazy as it may seem, was getting shipped off to Kansas [to prison]. I wasn’t going to change. My mom tried…Nobody could have done anything to change my situation, except the Man upstairs, who was seeing it and said, “Listen, before this goes any further, I’m going to have to take all of this away from you for awhile. And you’re going to have to get your priorities in order, but you gonna have to sit over there [in prison] to get it done. And that’s what happened.”

On Monday night, November 14, 2010, Michael Vick played one of the best games in NFL history. I, for one, hope Vick is telling the truth, and that he really learned his lesson, and that he is truly sorry for the savagery he showed those dogs, and for his other crimes and mistakes.

Though he had seen his first dog-fight when he was eight years old, Vick said, “I was twenty-five, twenty-six years old at the time, a man, old enough to be responsible for my decisions.”

I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. I want to believe that his outer game is a reflection of his inner game, that the Michael Vick we saw on the field Monday night was proof of the man inside. I want to believe in second chances, and third chances.

We could sit here and debate what’s really going on inside Vick’s head. Is he really sorry? Does he get it? Has he changed?

As the saying goes, only God, and maybe Vick’s hairdresser, knows for sure.

I want to believe the guy, because that way I can learn from him.   

         

             You’re given amazing gifts in this life, no matter who you are. Do not take them for granted.

            Take responsibility. If you make a mistake, own it, but don’t kill yourself over it. Even if it takes you a few tries to get it right.

             Learn from your mistakes. Like Vick, you can make your biggest mistake the biggest learning experience of your life.

            Learn, don’t wank. “I deserved to have it all taken away from me.”

Get real. “My whole life was a lie.”

            Work with what you’ve got. A few years spent in the slammer is not the best way to become the best quarterback in the NFL, except in Vick’s case, it was. 

            When you’re knocked down, especially by your own actions, get up.

            Be honest. Be vulnerable. Go deep.

            Look for the bigger picture. Find the meaning and the lesson in what happened.

           And be grateful.

Vick looks like a new man. His game is better than ever. He’s got a family. He’s working hard. The leeches, who were supposed to be his friends, are gone, so are the wild parties. On Sixty Minutes, Vick said he ‘cried’. This is the same guy who a few years ago was getting his rocks off watching dogs killing each other. Vick chose to see what had happened to him as being much bigger and much more important than the $130 million dollars he lost and the two years he spent in jail. He chose to learn and find meaning from what happened.

Time will tell if this is the real Michael Vick. I hope so, because I want to keep watching the guy. I want to keep learning from him. Damn, if Michael Vick keeps it together he may even turn me into a football fan.

           

I can be reached for personal coaching, etc. at drjohnluca@gmail.com.