December 8

Monthly Magazine

908th Issue

Consider This

*During the first year of business, the Coca-Cola Company sold only 400 Cokes. *Rafer Johnson, the decathlon champion, was born with a club foot. *Dr. Seuss's first children's book, "And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street" was rejected by 27 publishers. The 28th publisher, Vanguard Press, sold 6 million copies of the book. *In 1902, the poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly returned the poems of a 28-year-old poet with the following note: "Our magazine has no room for your vigorous verse." The poet was Robert Frost.

*In 1889, Rudyard Kipling received the following rejection letter from the San Francisco Examiner: "I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language." *Alex Haley got a rejection letter once a week for four years as a budding writer. Later in his career, Alex was ready to give up on the book "Roots" and himself. After nine years on the project, he felt inadequate to the task and was ready to throw himself off a freighter in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. As he was standing at the back of the freighter,

looking at the wake and preparing to throw himself into the ocean, he heard the voices of all his ancestors saying, "You go do what you got to do because they are all up there watching. Don't give up. You can do it. We're counting on you!" In the subsequent weeks the final draft of "Roots" poured out of him. *In 1905, the University of Bern turned down a doctoral dissertation as being irrelevant and fanciful. The young physics student who wrote the dissertation was Albert Einstein, who was disappointed but not defeated.

Jack CanfieldThoughts