I know you’ve heard this a million times before: quitters never win, winners never quit; if you fall off the horse, get back on; finish what you started.
I, like many others, find inspiration from real life stories.
In this blog I look at the world of Literature.
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is now studied in schools across the world. Time magazine ranked it as one of the top 100 English-language novels ever written. The book has sold more than 14.5 million copies since it was first published in 1954. Golding won a Nobel Prize for Literature largely based on this particular work. So I bet the person who read the original manuscript for it and declared it, “An absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull” spent much of his career regretting his words.
The same could be said about George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It also made Time’s list of best English-language books ever written, ranked in at #31 on the Modern Library’s List of Best 20th-Century Novels, and won retrospective Hugo award in 1996. Not only was Orwell’s classic written off (and completely misunderstood) by a publisher who noted, “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA,” Orwell’s peer and good friend T.S. Eliot was also less than impressed. Orwell sent a draft to Eliot, who responded that the writing was good, but the view was “not convincing” and that publishers would only accept the book if they had personal sympathy for the “Trotskyite” viewpoint.
It doesn’t stop there.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Plenty of publishers took a gander at the Chosen One and decided not to choose him, including bigwigs like Penguin and HarperCollins. J K Rowling finally decided to try a small London firm called Bloomsbury, who accepted only after the CEO’s eight-year-old daughter read the book and declared it a winner. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about all of the accolades and great commercial success that followed nearly immediately.
Even Gone with the Wind, one of the most enduring novels and movies of all time, didn’t score at the first time of asking. There aren’t too many people who haven’t heard the phrase, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” However, It was 38 publishers who didn’t give a damn originally. When Margaret Mitchell finally found a publisher in Macmillan, the book sold in stores for $3 apiece – quite a sum for 1936. Even at this rather high price point, the book sold more than one million copies by the end of the year. It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, and of course became an Academy Award-winning film in 1939.
Imagine if the authors of these books decided to listen to the first publisher they pitched their respective books to. The world deprived of pure masterpieces.
What ever your journey, you will come across some resistance from a third party. Friends, family, enemies, teachers, bosses at work. Their negative thoughts towards you and your dream are irrelevant unless you allow them to become your thoughts.
Believe in yourself. If you don’t you might be depriving the world of something life changing.
A Masterpiece!