“An inoffensive pleasant nothing. I can’t find fault with them musically – but there is no entertainment in anything they do. It’d just a group, and very ordinary too, backing a singer devoid of personality”.
“Routine beat group – strange choice of material. Amateur sounding vocalist who sings wrong notes and out of tune. Group has nothing to recommend it”.
These are two assessments from the audition report of David Bowie on 16th November 1965. The rest is history.
To quote the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, “Everything we hear is an opinion not a fact.” These words of wisdom are more than two millennia old and still as valid today as they were then. We are too often put down by the words of others because we give them too much weight. We observe this from the school playground where bullying can destroy a child’s self-confidence, to the office when put downs and negative comments can have the same impact.
There is an antidote.
Michael Caine famously said, “I never listened to the people who said I should give it up, which is the main advice I got.” Michael Caine was a working-class laborer with a strong London accent. He had no place in British cinema at the time and was regularly rejected at audition. His friends, working class Londoner’s like Caine, told him to stop wasting his time. He never gave up and got his break when he moved to America where is accent wasn’t looked down on – instead it made him different. Talent did the rest.
There are endless such examples. Some of the attributes that people such as David Bowie and Michael Caine had in common were tenacity, belief, and talent. Without the talent, the tenacity and belief are unlikely to count for much. It is important to make sure we are working towards something that we have the ability to succeed in. Whether singing, acting, running a business or being a teacher – whatever it is, if you have the ability, you then need to believe in yourself.
There will always be those who say you will fail, however those are the people who never took a risk and will never know what they could have achieved. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, including the ‘naysayers’, however the opinion that counts more than any other is your own.
In 2015, Mohammed Qahtani, a Saudi national, won the world Toastmasters championship. His winning speech is an excellent example of public speaking and how to capture an audience’s attention – you can find it on YouTube. Qahtani said “words when said and articulated in the right way can change someone’s mind...you have the power to bring someone from the slums of life and make a successful person out of them or destroy someone’s happiness using only your words.”
Within this quote is the conclusion to today’s blog which is that we have a responsibility both to ourselves and to others when it comes to the use of words. The responsibility to others is to help them rise to the highest height they can achieve. The responsibility to ourselves is to never succumb to the negative words of others.
Imagine how much poorer the world would be if the likes of Bowie, Caine had legions of others had ignored this responsibility...
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Excellent post and again very thoughtful.