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SOME FACTS ABOUT CREATIVE PEOPLE: DID YOU KNOW?

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 be mentally retarded."

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 anything.  

F.W. Woolworth got a job in a dry goods store when he was twenty-one, but his employers would not let him wait on a customer because he "didn't have enough sense."

A newspaper editor fired Walt Disney because he had "no good ideas."

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 sixty-two, and then only after a lifetime of defeat and setbacks. His greatest contributions came when he was a senior citizen.

Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he finally succeeded.

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.

An "expert" said of Vince Lombardi: "He possesses minimal football knowledge. Lacks motivation."

Gertrude Stein submitted her poems to editors for twenty years before she had one accepted.

Sam Walton's ideas for a discount store were rejected by executives at Ben Franklin as totally unworkable. Unconvinced, Walton went out on his own to form Wal-Mart. He became one of the most successful retailers in the country.

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