Posted by
Brad Yeager on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 9:28:37 AM
Before finally getting published, he was rejected by 123 publishers. In the first two days of pitching the book, his coauthor and he were shot down about a dozen times because “the title was stupid,” “nobody buys collections of short stories,” and because the book contained “no edge.”
The author was Jack Canfield (with Mark Victor Hansen), and the book was Chicken Soup for the Soul. The tome has spawned a book series, and now there are over 80 million copies in print.
Another individual was abandoned by his wife who had deemed him a failure. In the course of pursuing his dream, he found himself homeless and raising his toddler son alone. His dream began with an unpaid internship position with a brokerage firm in a high-cost West Coast city.
The man is Christopher Gardner, and he went on to become CEO of his own stock brokerage firm, Gardner Rich and Co. Mr. Gardner has amassed a net worth of roughly $65 million, and his published memoirs went on to become the basis of a little movie called The Pursuit of Happyness.
Another individual founded a computer company in the late ‘70s that helped bring personal computing into the mainstream. By 1985, in the midst of a company slump, he was forced out of the multi-million dollar organization he had helped create.
The man is Steve Jobs, founder and current CEO of Apple, Inc. After his forced resignation, he founded NeXT, a computer platform later bought out by Apple in 1997 for several hundreds of millions of dollars, and acquired Pixar Animation from LucasFilms Ltd, which has brought us such great films as Toy Story and Monsters Inc. He has since gone on as Apple’s CEO to revolutionize how we listen to music (with the iPod) and how music is distributed (see iTunes.com).
What do these individuals have in common? Luck? Nope. Timing? Well, sure. They also deliver intelligence, vision, and passion. While these are all great and admirable traits, the key thing they have that separates them from 95% of the rest of us is the ability to move beyond the “can’t.” The “can’t” is the chorus of voices – internal, external, and situational - that speak in opposition to our pursuits, dreams, and daily assignments. The “can’t” is our invisible prison, the difference between living life and feeling alive.