The Rest is History

John Grisham has written best selling novels that have published hundreds of millions of copies. Some of his books have even turned into successful movies.

John went to school and became a lawyer and as a young man he was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives.

His true love, was writing. He started getting up early in the morning to write before his workday began.

His first book was a modest flop. He was rejected by the first sixteen book agents and the first thirty publishing houses. Finally, someone published five thousand copies and he purchased one thousand of them. The writing bug had bitten him, so he continued to write.

His second book, "The Firm," was on the "New York Times" best seller list for forty-seven weeks and became a blockbuster movie.

The rest is history.

Price of Success

As a young man Henry Ford had a love for anything mechanical. When the German inventor, Karl Berry, patented the automobile in 1886, Ford rushed to launch his own design. He quit his job with Thomas A. Edison and focused on his high performance twenty-six horse power, two-cylinder engine.

In order to bring his automobile to production, Henry tried several partnerships. None of them worked out well. He launched the Ford Motor Company in 1903. There were more than fifty other car manufacturers in the USA at that time, but none were doing mass production. Ford's innovation was the assembly line. He was out to produce strong, dependable cars at modest prices.

By 1914, Ford had 13,000 workers on his assembly line. The competitors needed 66,350 workers to match him. His Model-T Ford cost $275, where his competitor's vehicles cost more than $1,000.

Determination is the price of success.

Strength, Endurance and Faith

Nelson Mandela was born into a privileged family in South Africa. He earned a law degree, opened his own firm, and was on his way to a life of ease and affluence. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut about the racial injustices of the apartheid government.

Instead, Mandela joined the African National Congress, a political opposition party which demanded equal rights for native Africans. He became a leader.

Because of his involvement, Mandela received a life prison sentence. He was given a thin blanket, an iron bucket for a toilet, and a straw mat to sleep on. His food was meager and he was beaten unmercifully time and time again. His years were spent alternating between solitary confinement and harsh physical labor.

Thirty years after having been unjustly sentenced to prison, the protests of his fellow black South Africans became so loud that he was released. Three years later, in 1993, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. The next year he became the President of South Africa.

It's called strength, endurance and faith.

What is your excuse?

Wilma Rudolph was born two months premature. She weighed only four and one half pounds at birth. Since the local hospital where the family lived did not take black patients, her mother chose to nurse her at home.

Rudolph suffered from an alarming succession of childhood illnesses - measles, mumps, chicken pox, scarlet fever and double pneumonia. Then Wilma's leg began to weaken and become more and more deformed. Her mother boarded a Greyhound bus and took Wilma to a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. The doctors told her mother that Wilma had a disease that had no cure and that Wilma would never be able to walk.

Wilma would prove the doctors wrong. First, she learned to walk with metal leg braces. Then, she learned to run. The braces came off and she kept running.

Wilma Rudolph won a track scholarship to Tennessee State University. In 1960, she traveled to Rome to represent the U.S. in the Olympic Games. She came home with three gold medals and three new world records. She became "the fastest woman in the world."

So what is your excuse?

The wizard of Tuskegee

George Washington Carver was born into slavery near the beginning of the Civil War. While George's mother was sold and sent away, his former owner was able to get him and his brother back. He exchanged a horse for them. The owner raised George and his brother as his own.

After emancipation, Carver tried his luck at various ventures including college and homesteading. He failed at everything he tried.

He tried one last ditch effort at college. He was the first black student at Simpson College in Iowa. He did well this time. He earned a Bachelor's and Master's degree at Iowa State Agricultural College - later known as Iowa State University. They appointed him to the faculty as a professor.

Booker T. Washington then hired George Washington Carver to teach at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and he became the greatest American scientist in the nineteenth century. They called him "the wizard of Tuskegee." He developed three hundred products from the peanut and one hundred eighteen products from the sweet potato.

Not bad for a fellow who started off as a failure.

Jimmy Carter

On January 20, 1981, Jimmy Carter left Washington, D.C. for Plains, Georgia. Ronald Reagan had won the Presidential election in November, 1980 and at noon on January 20 he became the President of the United States.

Think about it. One day you are the most powerful person in the world, the next day you are a defeated, humiliated citizen of Plains; a town of some 600 citizens in Southwest Georgia.

Carter was shunned by his Democratic colleagues for a number of years. No one wanted to be seen with him or identified with him.

To make matters worse, his brother, Billy, who had managed his wealth in a blind trust, had lost everything.

What did Carter do? He made furniture, wrote, spoke, and volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. Eventually Carter made his way back into the public sphere. In 2002, he won the Noble Peace Prize.

No Failure is Final

Mohandas Gandhi, the founder of modern India, was not always a hero. As a young man he was considered a mediocre student with no discernable talents. He got married at age thirteen to the daughter of a family friend. The marriage got off to a rocky start. His wife found him to be impatient, immature, jealous and controlling.

Gandhi wanted to become a physician, but in college he flunked his science courses. He returned home in disgrace.

Through family connections, Gandhi went to England and managed to become a lawyer. But, his legal career was a failure.

Through another family connection he got a bookkeeping job in South Africa. It was there that Gandhi developed a philosophy of life that changed India and the world.

Martin Luther King Jr. learned the principle of non-violent resistance from Mohandas Gandhi.

No failure is final.