SO YOU THINK you’re hopeless? Useless? Can’t make it? Bound to fail? Did your report cards say things like “easily distracted” … “not achieving” … or maybe even “mentally challenged!”?
Well, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Listen up – and think again:
- Fred Astaire, after his first screen test, went away with an assessment which read, “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance – a little.” He framed it, and put it over the mantle of his Hollywood mansion.
- Walt Disney was once fired by an editor for his sorry lack of ideas. He also went bankrupt more than once before building Disneyland.
- Isaac Newton (of apple-and-gravity fame) flunked primary school.
- So did Albert Einstein – who didn’t speak till he was four, couldn’t read till he was seven, was described as “mentally slow, unsociable and adrift” by his primary teachers, and was expelled from Zurich polytech.
- Enrico Caruso, the famous Italian tenor, was told by his first singing teacher that he had no voice, couldn’t sing and ought to forget music as a career.
- Beethoven handled the violin awkwardly – and was chastised by his teacher for playing his own compositions, which were labelled “hopeless”!
- The French sculptor, Rodin, had his father once say of him, “I’ve got an idiot for a son!” Not only that, he failed three times to gain admittance to art school.
- And Leo Tolstoy, author of War & Peace and one of the world’s greatest novelists, flunked high school and was criticised for being “both unable and unwilling to learn”.
So go on! Get out those old school reports and read them again. You’re probably doing better than you thought!
