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WITandWISDOM(tm) - June 28, 2002 ISSN 1538-8794 ~~~~~~~ THOUGHTS: "If you wait until you are sure you will never take off the training wheels." Source: Heart Touchers, http://www.hearttouchers.com Subjects: Fear ~~~~~~~ SPECIAL THOUGHTS: Have you failed enough? Most of us have not. We're so afraid of failure that we never muddle our way through to the big success. Turns out that the most successful people are generally the ones who have failed the most. Whether your idea of success is Bill Clinton or Bill Gates or Bill Graham, success usually lies on the far side of failure. Take Walt Disney for example. He was fired by a newspaper because - now get this - he lacked ideas! After that first failure, he proceeded to go bankrupt several times before he finally built the Magic Kingdom. Babe Ruth struck out 1330 times. Of course, he also hit 714 home runs. But for every home run, he struck out twice. R. H. Macy failed seven times before his store in New York caught on. I have some friends and business associates who are writers. Being a writer sounds kind of glamorous, doesn't it? Actually it's a lot of hard work. How do you get to be a writer? One definition holds that you are an honest-to-goodness writer once you have accumulated 200 rejection slips. You can't call yourself a writer until you've failed enough. But what would you call English novelist John Creasey? He accumulated 753 rejection slips. Then he published 564 books. Perhaps you have read one of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. You may not know that the original manuscript was rejected by 80 publishers. There's no market for it, wise editors said. But the poor authors didn't have the good sense to give up. Since no publisher would take it, they had to publish it themselves. It made them millions. Source: Never Give Up by Tim Crosby, Copyright (c) 2001 by The Quiet Hour http://www.thequiethour.org/ Subjects: Failure, Success ~~~~~~~ THIS & THAT: HOW TO KNOW YOU'RE GROWING OLDER: Dialing long distance wears you out. Your knees buckle and your belt won't. You know all the answers, but nobody asks you the questions. The gleam in your eyes is from the sun hitting your bifocals. The little gray haired lady you help across the street is your wife. You sink your teeth into a steak and they stay there. Your back goes out more than you do. Every thing hurts and what doesn't hurt, doesn't work. You're 17 around the neck, 42 around the waist, and 106 around the golf course. Source: Smile a Day Newsletter©, http://www.net153.com/best.htm Subjects: Aging ~~~~~~~ KEEP SMILING: Because our former small-town parish was not a wealthy one, our pastor was dependent on parishioners for upkeep and maintenance of the church. Once he asked my husband, Sam, to rewire the confessionals. The only way to reach the wiring was to enter the attic above the altar and crawl over the ceiling by balancing on the rafters. Concerned for my husband's safety, I waited in a pew. Unbeknownst to me, some parishioners were congregating in the vestibule. They paid little attention to me, probably assuming I was praying. Worried about my husband, I looked up toward the ceiling and yelled, "Sam, Sam -- are you up there? Did you make it okay?" There was quite an outburst from the vestibule when Sam's hearty voice echoed down, "Yes, I made it up here just fine!" Contributed to Reader's Digest Laugh Lines by Christine Fodera Source: Reader's Digest, Copyright (c), http://www.readersdigest.com Subjects: Church, Heaven ~~~~~~~ TRIVIA: It's something like what Coach John McKay of USC said to his team after they had been humiliated 51-0 by Notre Dame. McKay came into the locker room and saw a group of beaten worn-out and thoroughly depressed young football players who were not accustomed to losing. He stood up on a bench and said, "Men, let's keep this in perspective. There are 800 million Chinese who don't even know this game was played." That's what you call perspective. By Steve Farrar, Family Survival in the American Jungle, p. 40 Published by Multnomah Pub (Sep 1, 1991) ISBN: 0880704527 http://isbn.nu/0880704527 Source: My Daily Dose of Inspiration, http://www.quietstones.com/mydailydose Subjects: Failure, Losing, Perspective |