Monday, February 25, 2008 Have faith in yourself By Henrylito D. Tacio Regarding Henry
"ALL things come to him who waits," so goes a popular saying. But what he would get, as John C. Maxwell, are "just the leftovers from the people who got there first." More often than not, there are people who work as if there is no tomorrow.
"Responsible people show up when they're expected," explains Maxwell, America's leading authority on leadership. "But highly competent people take it a step further. They don't show up in body only. They come ready to play every day - no matter how they feel, what kind of circumstances they face, or how difficult they expect the game to be."
At one time, Lou Gehrig, the famous American homerun king of the New York Yankees' baseball team, visited a hospital for crippled children just before a World Series game. He told the children in the ward, "You can do anything if you want to do it badly enough."
A little boy, who was a Yankee fan, asked the great ballplayer to do him a favor, "Please, knock two homeruns in today's game." Gehrig replied, "Two homeruns in a World Series game is a lot to ask."
But now, Gehrig had to back up what he had said earlier about being able to do anything if one really wants to do it badly enough. So he turned to the little boy and said, "I'll make a bargain with you. I'll knock two homeruns today if you promise me that you will walk again." It was a deal and they shook hands on it.
Gehrig knocked his two homeruns that afternoon. But somehow, he never got around to going back to the hospital he visited before the game. One day, years later, he was entering Yankee Stadium when a tall young man stepped up and asked him, "Do you remember me?"
Gehrig couldn't remember him. Sensing that the baseball player couldn't recall the event that happened years earlier, he reminded him, "I was that boy you made a deal with years back. Look, I can walk now. I kept my half of the promise."
There comes a time when you have an idea and no one listens to you. If you can't catch their attention, why not do it yourself? Take the case of inventor, statesman, and publisher Benjamin Franklin. During a time when he was working on improvements in agriculture, he discovered that plaster made grains and grasses grows better, but he had difficult time convincing his neighbors about the discovery.
He found a solution to the problem. When spring came, he went to a field close to a path, dug out some letters into the dirt with his hands, put plaster into the ruts, and then sowed seed over the whole area. As people passed that way in the following weeks, they could see green letters growing brighter than the rest of the field. They simply said, "This has been plastered." People got the message.
Never be afraid that you will fail in whatever endeavor you will do. "He who has never failed," commented Emmett LeCompte, "has never tried." It's better to have tried and failed and never to have tried at all.
This reminds me of the story of Thomas Alva Edison. This American inventor had only three months of formal schooling. And yet, history records show that he knew more failures than successes.
For 13 months, Edison kept on searching for a filament that would stand the stress of electric current. As he pondered whether he would be able to discover the elusive thing, he got a note from people backing his experiment that they would no longer be giving additional funds for what he was then doing.
News like that may bring a person to quit, but not Edison. In fact, it did not deter him from continuing his work. He refused to admit defeat and worked without sleep for two more days and nights. Eventually, he managed to insert one of the crude carbonized threads into a vacuum-sealed bulb. "When we turned on the current," he recalled, "the sight we had so long desired finally met our eyes!"
Before that, however, Edison had to endure a string of failures. "What a waste! We have tried no less than 700 experiments and nothing has worked. We are not a bit better off than when we started," a couple of men who were working alongside him said.
He just shrugged this comment, telling them, "Oh yes, we are! We now know 700 things that won't work. We're closer than we've ever been before." For comments, write me at henrytacio@gmail.com.
