My Top 10 Deluded People

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My Top 10 Deluded People

10 Marilyn Monroe… Dropped in 1947 by Twentieth
Century-Fox after one year under contract because she was
“unattractive.”

9 Roger Bannister was a very deluded man – he actually believed a man could run a mile in under four minutes. Doctors even told him he would die if he attempted this feat. And guess what? Within a year of Bannister achieving his dream, over 300 other runners did exactly the same.

8 Thomas Edison “failed” over 9000 times before perfecting the light bulb! How many of us would have thrown in the “proverbial” towel at 20 failures, 150 failures or at the 8,000th failure. After Edison had invented and produced the light-bulb a reporter asked him how it felt to fail over 9000 times. Edison replied, “I was glad I found 9000 ways not to invent the light bulb!”

7 Elvis Presley’s music teacher at L.C.Humes High School in Memphis gave him a C and told him he couldn’t sing (how many of us learned at school we weren’t very good at things, and how often we are proved right?). Fortunately Elvis ignored this…

6 Samuel Johnson dropped out of Oxford in 1729 after fourteen months and never received a degree. After moving to London, virtually penniless, he wrote a book that told us what words mean! The man should have been locked up. I mean, who would ever have a need for a dictionary!

5 JK Rowling had her first book rejected “loads” of times by 12 different publishers and she was told “magic books don’t sell”.

4 Cameron Mackintosh decided to produce a musical about felines at a venue (The New London) that had never had a hit. Most people thought him mad, and certainly deluded. Cats became one of the longest running musicals ever. A few years later, clearly not having learned his lesson, he produced another show, wait for it, set in pre-revolutionary France, featuring poverty, death and despair. How entertaining is that? It opened to very small audiences at The Barbican in London and almost every critic hated it. Cameron would surely finally accept defeat, wouldn’t he? I’m afraid not. Les Misérables is now the most successful musical in the world.

3 After years of rejection, an American novelist started a story about a teenager named Carietta White. Disgusted with what he had written, he screwed up the pages and threw them in the rubbish bin. His wife pulled those pages out of the bin, read them, and then convinced her husband to complete the story—which became the huge best-seller Carrie. Stephen King is now one of the most successful authors of all time.

2 Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island for twenty-seven years as punishment for his efforts opposing apartheid. That’s twenty-seven years. Yet he never gave up his beliefs about what was right, he never gave up his dream, and every day he stayed strong in the belief that his work and that of his supporters, would prevail.

1 You. Please, whatever you are doing right now, revisit what you most dream, desire and deserve. Perhaps it is new; perhaps it is an old wish, dusted off anew. It may be personal; it may be reconnecting with your partner or your children. It may be forgiving someone in your family, after many years. It may be to do with your work or career.

Whatever it is – please go for it, and be the very best that you already are.

With my love and best wishes to you all.

David

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Adapted From The Naked Leader Experience