INSPIRATION: If at first you don't succeed

Monday Morning Eye Openers:Imaginative and creative people are often not recognized by their contemporaries. History is full of illustrations. Consider some of these:Einstein was four years old before he could speak and seven before he could read. Someone once said of him: 'He doesn't wear socks and forgets to cut his hair. Could he be mentally retarded?'Isaac Newton did poorly in grade school.Beethoven's music teacher once said of him, 'As a composer, he is hopeless.'A well-known magazine editor told Emily Dickinson her poems were unpublishable because they failed to rhyme.When Thomas Edison was a boy, his teachers told him he was too stupid to learn.F.W. Woolworth got a job in a dry goods store when he was 21 but his employers would not let him wait on customers because he 'didn't have enough sense.'A newspaper editor fired Walt Disney because he had 'no good ideas.'Caruso's music teacher told him, 'You can't sing, you have no voice at all.'The director of the Imperial Opera in Vienna told Madame Schumann Heink that she would never be a singer and advised her to buy a sewing machine.An infamous review of William Wordsworth's greatest poem began with the sentence, 'This simply will not do.'Leo Tolstoy flunked out of college.Werner Von Braun flunked ninth-grade algebra.Fred Waring was once rejected from his high school chorus.Socrates was called 'an immoral corrupter of youth.'Admiral Richard E. Byrd had been retired from the Navy as 'unfit for service' until he flew over both poles.Louis Pasteur was rated as 'mediocre' in chemistry when he attended the Royal College.Abraham Lincoln entered the Black Hawk War as a captain and came out a private.Louisa May Alcott was told by an editor that she could never write anything that had popular appeal.Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade and failed the entrance exams to Sandhurst twice before he finally passed. He did not become Prime Minister of England until he was 62, and then only after a lifetime of defeats and setbacks. His greatest contributions came when he was a 'senior citizen.'Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he finally succeeded.Babe Ruth, considered by sport historians to be the greatest athlete of all time and famous for setting the home run record, also holds the record for the most strikeouts.Eighteen publishers turned down Richard Bach's 10,000 word story about a 'soaring' Seagull, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, before Macmillan finally published it in 1970. By 1975, it had sold more than 7 million copies in the U.S. alone.Colonel Sanders was considered 'too old' to start a business.After Fred Astaire's first screen test, the memo from the testing director of MGM, dated 1933, said, 'Can't Act!, Slightly Bald! Can dance a little!'An 'expert' said of Vince Lombardi, 'He possesses minimal football knowledge. Lacks motivation.'Carol Channing became a star after being told she wasn't good enough to be in a chorus.Gertrude Stein submitted her poems to editors for 20 years before she had one accepted.The Beatles were rejected innumerable times before Parlophone finally took them on in 1962.