One of the most difficult and challenging aspects of being a stockbroker was making the largely dreaded "cold calls." We were required to make phone calls to literally hundreds of prospects each day, many of whom had never heard of us, in an effort to solicit new business. Rejection was a way of life, and I learned not to take it personally. It was all a numbers game. The more people I called, the more accounts I opened. In addition to cold calling, I also had to coddle very nervous clients during roller-coaster stock-market conditions. This was no easy feat!
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Eventually, all the hard work paid off. In less than four years, I became one of the top salespeople at my branch and increased personal sales by 1,700 percent. Through continued faith and persistence, I built and managed multimillion-dollar investment portfolios for U.S. clients, many of whom were distinguished men and women from America's corporate boardrooms, wealthy socialites, doctors and lawyers, as well as nonprofit foundations. This resulted in a cover story for Careers and the disAbled Magazine, as well as worldwide press coverage on CNN and in numerous newspapers, including the New York Times. All this success earned me a six-figure income, a spot in the prestigious Merrill Lynch Executive Club three years in a row and numerous sales awards.
Toward the end of my fourth year at Merrill Lynch, it hit me like a ton of bricks that something was missing. I became spiritually bankrupt and depressed. I thought long and hard about my goals and where to go next.
At one point, I pleaded with God and asked to be led in the right direction. The Source reminded me of the time when I spoke to hundreds of people, while in college as a student leader, and years later, when I won a "Humorous Speech" championship. It dawned on me that every time I had a speaking engagement, I always came out of the experience with a wonderful, energetic, peaceful and magical feeling that was unmatched by anything else I ever did. I instinctively knew God had blessed me with extraordinary public-speaking skills that could enable me to make a lasting difference and transform other people's lives.
After considering my options, I took another daring risk, gave up everything and left the lucrative investment business for a more satisfying career as a motivational speaker. A lot of people, including my parents, thought I was crazy. "It is a pie-in-the-sky dream, because it isn't
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realistic," they said. I paid no attention to those words, and to this day I have never looked back.
The beginning of my speaking journey was eerily similar to what I had first experienced at Merrill Lynch. Once again, I went back to dining on pasta, peanut butter sandwiches and cereal. Working temporary jobs in between long stretches of speaking engagements was both a harrowing and a humbling experience. There were times when I had only a few dollars in my pocket and ate once a day. If everyone did this, it would put the diet industry out of business! To save money, instead of taking the subway to different parts of the city, I walked or rode my bike. Cab drivers were losing money because of me. Meanwhile, to keep my dream burning brightly, I worked hard on creating a personal message that would reflect my collective learning experiences in the world of finance and inspire people to be the best they could be.
Nothing in the world comes close to the satisfying feeling I get when thousands of people tell me how much I have made a difference in their lives by motivating them to take risks, to make necessary changes and to accept themselves as spiritual beings having a human experience!
The core of my message is, "If I can do it, you can, too!" What could be more satisfying than that? And I say that because I have been deaf since birth!
Stephen Hopson
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Emma's Ducks
The winter of 1966 hit our university in upstate New York with a ferocity unrivaled in decades. For three days straight, the snow swirled and billowed, burying the isolated campus. Here and there stray groups of students struggled single file against the weather, like ducklings following their mother across a road. The female students in dormitory B were confronted with the same problem plaguing the general population of the university.
''How are we going to get to the cafeteria?" asked one.
"We're not," answered another. "Everything out there is white. You can't see anything."
A gleam came into the eye of the third girl. She shushed the others' whining, saying triumphantly, "Emma could do it."
The whining turned to murmurs of excitement. "Emma!" "She even manages through the city." "We could follow her." "You're a genius!''
The girls whooped, yelled and clapped for joy. They bundled up and excitedly trooped down the hall to Emma's room. They found her in the hallway and cornered her before she could even open her door.
"What's all the excitement?" she asked, smiling.
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"Can we follow you to the cafeteria? We're blind in this storm."
They all laughed.
"I suppose so. I'll go first, and you could hold on to each other's shoulders."
"Can we go now?" one girl begged. "I'm starving."
Emma smiled again. "Sure, let me just get Missy ready."
She went into her room and returned moments later with a dog on a harness. The girls lined up obediently at the front door, ready to face the cold. They each placed their hands on the shoulders of the girl in front of them.
Emma opened the door to lead them out. "I guess," she smiled, "you could call this the blind leading the seeing."
And with that, Emma and her seeing-eye dog, Missy, led her troop of hungry ducks to the cafeteria.
Paul Karrer
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Consider This
[EDITORS' NOTE: The following are excerpts from a commencement address given by Bill Clinton at Princeton University on June 4, 1996.]
Just consider this, there's more computer power in a Ford Taurus every one of you can buy and drive to the supermarket than there was in Apollo II when Neil Armstrong took it to the moon. Nobody who wasn't a high-energy physicist had even heard of the World Wide Web when I became President. And now even my cat, Socks, has his own page. By the time a child born today is old enough to read, over 100 million people will be on the Internet.
Just consider the last hundred years. At the turn of the century the progressives made it the law of the land for every child to be in school. Before then there was no such requirement. After World War II, we said ten years are not enough, public schools should extend to twelve years. And then the G.I. Bill and college loans threw open the doors of college to the sons and daughters of farmers and factory workers, and they have powered our economy ever since.
America knows that higher education is the key to the
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growth we need to lift our country, and today that is more true than ever. Over half the new jobs created in the last three years have been managerial and professional jobs. The new jobs require a higher level of skills.
Fifteen years ago the typical worker with a college degree made 38 percent more than a worker with a high-school diploma. Today that figure is 73 percent more. Two years of college means a 20 percent increase in annual earnings. People who finish two years of college earn a quarter of a million dollars more than their high-school counterparts over a lifetime.
The older I get and the more I become aware that I have more yesterdays than tomorrows, the more I think that in our final hours, which all of us have to face, very rarely will we say, "Gosh, I wish I had spent more time at the office," or, "If only I had made just a little more money." But we will think about the dreams we lived out, the wonders we knew, when we were most fully alive.
Bill Clinton
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All in the Family
I met Eileen, my brother's wife, when I was seven years old. Only she wasn't his wife then. She was an amazing nineteen-year-old with blond streaks in her hair! I loved her immediately. She was exotic and funny and terrified of my parents when she came over for dinner the first time.
This was back in the days of form
al meals with lots of forks lined up. Eileen dropped two peas in her lap, then two more and then another one. She thought nobody saw. I watched her wrap them up in her napkin discreetly. After dinner I told her, "I saw the peas." I said I wouldn't tell, though. Thirty-one years have passed, and this is the first time I've said anything to anybody. It's okayshe said I could.
We were talking on the phone the other day, right around her fiftieth birthday. She was trying to describe what fifty felt like. She said that of the women in our family, she didn't feel like the mature one. Brain-wise, she said, my sisters and I had passed her a long time ago. There were times she felt left out.
For my sisters and me, it was the natural order of things: high school, college, grad school. But Eileen worked while my brother went through medical school.
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Then she had babies. She chose to be a full-time mother at a time when many women chose careers first. You never saw a person who loved babies so much. You never saw a happier mom.
"And you never knew how I ached," Eileen said.
No, I didn't.
She told me about a ringthe college ring she had gotten right before she had dropped out. She wore it for years but decided one day to take it off.
"A woman at the library recognized it and said she had gone to the same school," Eileen explained. "And so she asked when I graduated. And I said, 'Well actually I didn't.' And she said, 'Well then why are you wearing that ring?' And I thought: This woman is right. I am a phony. I am pretending to be someone I am not."
I never knew this college thing was such a huge deal to her. She used to tease my sisters about "getting to the other side." By the time I got there, she was joking about being abandoned. I laughed right along with her, never realizing.
Now I do. I've been out of school long enough to chase other dreams. I understand what it is to have an unfulfilled promise to yourself. It can seem so tiny to everyone else as to be imperceptible. But so can a grain of sand in your eye.
In lieu of the college ring, Eileen took to wearing her daughter's high-school ring. "I was so proud of Alyson for graduating high school," she said.
Alyson is now in college, studying art. Her younger brother John finished college in two and a half years. Joe, the third child, is a star student in high school. Tom, the youngest, is in the eighth grade. Eileen has always paid special attention to Tom's schooling. For a while there, it seemed as if Eileen and Tom were always doing homework together.
Now she tells me: "I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown. I was everybody else but me. I lived
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through my husband. I lived through my kids. I wanted to have control of everybody. I wanted them to live my dream.
"And so I was hell-bent that my kids were going to go to college. They were never going to feel inadequate, the way I did. And that was so wrong. I had to get my own life."
So a year ago, she signed up for two English courses at the college she had left eighteen years before. The first day of class, she put the ring back on. She got books, test dates, assignments. She thought, There is no way I can do this.
Well, she got an A and a B-plus in those courses. She signed up for four courses over the summer. Then the following semester, just last September, she signed up for five courses and committed herself to write her senior thesis on Charles Dickens.
She aced all five classes. She aced her thesis. She is about to graduate, at fifty, this spring. She told me she hasn't been this happy since she was nineteen, and she said the happiness is only incidentally about the college degree.
She told me about Joe and John cooking dinner for the family while she was off at class. She told me about Alyson cleaning the house so her mom could study. She told me about my brother tutoring her in chemistry. She told me who volunteered to read her thesis: Tom.
It was because of her family, not despite it, that she was able to make it. And this circle of give-and-take had made fifty the greatest age to be.
Jeanne Marie Laskas
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Never Too Old to Live Your Dream
The first day of school our professor introduced himself to our chemistry class and challenged us to get to know someone we didn't already know. I stood up to look around when a gentle hand touched my shoulder. I turned around to find a wrinkled, little old lady beaming up at me with a smile that lit up her entire being.
She said, "Hi, handsome. My name is Rose. I'm eighty-seven years old. Can I give you a hug?"
I laughed and enthusiastically responded, "Of course you may!" and she gave me a giant squeeze.
"Why are you in college at such a young, innocent age?" I asked.
She jokingly replied, "I'm here to meet a rich husband, get married, have a couple children, and then retire and travel."
"No seriously," I asked. I was curious what may have motivated her to be taking on this challenge at her age.
"I always dreamed of having a college education and now I'm getting one!" she told me.
After class we walked to the student union building and shared a chocolate milkshake. We became instant friends. Every day for the next three months we would
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leave class together and talk nonstop. I was always mesmerized listening to this "time machine" as she shared her wisdom and experience with me.
Over the course of the school year, Rose became a campus icon and easily made friends wherever she went. She loved to dress up and she reveled in the attention bestowed upon her from the other students. She was living it up.
At the end of the semester we invited Rose to speak at our football banquet and I'll never forget what she taught us. She was introduced and stepped up to the podium. As she began to deliver her prepared speech, she dropped her three-by-five cards on the floor. Frustrated and a bit embarrassed she leaned into the microphone and simply said, "I'm sorry I'm so jittery. I gave up beer for Lent and this whiskey is killing me! I'll never get my speech back in order so let me just tell you what I know." As we laughed, she cleared her throat and began:
"We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing. There are only four secrets to staying young, being happy and achieving success.
"You have to laugh and find humor each and every day.
"You've got to have a dream. When you lose your dreams, you die. We have so many people walking around who are dead and they don't even know it!
"There is a giant difference between growing older and growing up. If you are nineteen years old and lie in bed for one full year and don't do one productive thing, you will turn twenty years old. If I am eight-seven years old and stay in bed for a year and never do anything I will turn eighty-eight. Anybody can grow older. That doesn't take any talent or ability. The idea is to grow up by always finding the opportunity in change.
"Have no regrets. The elderly usually don't have regrets for what we did, but rather for things we did not do. The only people who fear death are those with regrets."
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She concluded her speech by courageously singing "The Rose." She challenged each of us to study the lyrics and live them out in our daily lives.
Chicken Soup for the College Soul Page 25
