Steve Goodier writes about some people who did not listen to their critics. They rose above criticism.
Did you know that Albert Einstein could not speak until he was four years old and did not read until he was seven? His parents and teachers worried about his mental ability.
Or that Beethoven’s music teacher said about him, “As a composer he is hopeless”? What if young Ludwig believe it? When Thomas Edison was a young boy, his teachers said he was so stupid he could never learn anything. He once said, “I remember I used to never be able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class…my father thought I was stupid, and I almost decided that I was a dunce.” What if young Thomas Edison believed what they said about him? When F. W. Woolworth was 21, he got a job in a store, but was not allowed to wait on customers because, according to his boss, he “didn’t have enough sense.” I wonder if the boss was around when Woolworth became one of the most successful retailers of his day. When the sculptor Auguste Rodin was young he had difficulty learning to read and write. Today, we may say he had a learning disabiltiy, but his father said of him, “I have an idiot for a son.” His uncle agreed. “He’s uneducable, ” he said. What if the boy had doubted his ability to excel? A newspaper editor once fired Walt Disney because he was thought to have no “good ideas.”
The great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso was told by one music teacher, “You can’t sing. You have no voice at all.”
And an editor told Louisa May Alcott just a few years before she wrote the classic novel “Little Women,” that she was incapable of writing anything that would have popular appeal.
I don’t know about you, but I am utterly amazed when I read of this list of people who could have well been defeated by what people said of them. However, they were very successful inspite of doubters. They would not allow the discouraging voices of others to put them down or hold them back. They made something of themselves and have made the world better because of it.
We all have potential and it is your desire to make something good of yourself, to be the best that you can be.
Someone said, “Success is doing the best you can, with what you have, where you are, to the glory of God.”
Seek God’s help to grow, to become all that you can be.
Max Speaking 