When Life Gives You A Lemon... Make Lemonade
Have you ever gotten discouraged? Ok, not a good question. Maybe the right question is "How many times have you gotten discouraged?" Discouragement is part of life. It happens. But how we respond to it is a key.
Harvey Mackay is one of my favorite authors. He is the best-selling author of "How To Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive." His most recent book is "Use Your Head To Get Your Foot In The Door." One of the chapters is "You're Never A Failure Until You Think Are."
If you lose your job you can begin to think that you are a failure but that's not true. In fact, Mackay wrote another book several years ago entitled "I Got Fired And It Was The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me." But, back to this blog post...
Mackay tells the story of how one of the greatest novels in American literature was the result of a very discouraging day for the author. Nathaniel Hawthorne had lost his job at a customhouse and went home to break the news to his wife. Rather than the news he expected, she was overjoyed. She said "Now you can write your book."
Unconvinced, Hawthorne asked "And what shall we live on while I write?"
Sophia opened a drawer that contained a substantial amount of money and said "I've always known that you were a man of genius. I knew that someday you would write a masterpiece." She explained that she had saved some of the household money each week and had saved enough to last for a year. With that, Hawthorne went to work on "The Scarlet Letter" required reading for many in High School English. And all because Sophia Hawthorne refused to let her husband be discouraged.
If you are down, keep smiling, keep working, keep doing the right thing. Sometimes, the best things come out of a time of discouragement.
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