Who said you couldn’t?
That boy was only seven years old. His teacher gave him up for lost. In the presence of the little boy, he spoke to her mother and told her that he was “empty” and that it was useless for him to continue attending school. The poor woman, embarrassed, taught her to read personally at home. That boy over time left his name written in hundreds of patents for inventions that affected the lives of all humanity. His name of him? Thomas Alba Edison. His inventions of him? Among hundreds of them, the electric light and the phonograph record.
It’s amazing how often great men and women were misjudged before they became famous. It was said of Abraham Lincoln that he “had only been to school four months, that he was a dreamer and that he insisted on asking stupid questions.” But the man rose to the presidency of his country, and from there he made decisions as dramatic in his time as the abolition of slavery, and he led the government with a firm hand through a civil war that he ended up winning, thereby laying the foundations for foundations for the future greatness of his nation.
It was said of the great singer Enrico Caruso that he had no voice. From Albert Einstein that he was a very bad student, mentally slow, not very sociable and always dreamy. Of Amelia Earhart, the pioneering aviator, it was said that while she was bright and curious, she was so interested in insects and other crawling things that she could never “think tall.” Benito Juárez was judged “inferior” because of his totally indigenous ancestry, to the point that Mexican conservatives looked in Europe for someone with “blue blood” to replace him in government.
There is something interesting in the biography of all these characters, they managed to prove that these negative predictions were wrong. They discovered that with their effort they could overcome adversity. They discovered something that you and I should discover too, that the power with which God endowed us, is much stronger than the opinion, perhaps even sincere, with which the “experts” want to brand us.
The negative: Letting the opinion of others determine what we can and cannot do.
The positive: Having a resistant attitude that becomes the method to handle the unfavorable opinion of others, as our challenge for the future.
Javier’s Catholic website
If you liked the reflection, please share it on social networks by clicking the following buttons:
Xavier’s Catholic Web Index
catholic reflections
Sign in the guest book
Subscribe to Javier’s Catholic Web mailing list for free to receive weekly updates by email.