Today is April 22 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you develop the strength to overcome adversity?”
Debbie Macomber is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. But she started out in life like so many other successful people. She had to find her way and overcome one obstacle after another.
Macomber is dyslexic and has only a high school education. Without the benefit of a formal college education, Macomber dedicated herself to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. She rented a typewriter and sat in her kitchen to develop her first few manuscripts.
She did all this while raising four children.
After five years and many rejections from publishers, she was not to be deterred and turned to freelance magazine work. Macomber attended a romance writer's conference, where one of her manuscripts was selected to be publicly critiqued by an editor from Harlequin Enterprises.
The editor tore apart her novel and recommended that she throw it away.
Macomber refused to give up. She scraped together $10 to mail the same novel, Heartsong, to Harlequin's rival, Silhouette Books. Silhouette bought the book, which became the first romance novel to be reviewed by Publishers Weekly.
“When I started out 35 years ago I saw a quote from Phyllis Whitney: ‘There has never been an easy time to sell a book.’ I wanted this more than I ever wanted anything in my life. I got rejected so fast, my manuscripts would hit me in the back of the head on my way back from the post office.” But Macomber never gave up. “It has a lot to do with stubbornness and desire,” she said, adding that she similarly trained herself to run despite a lack of athletic ability. In both cases, “It was making myself stick to it until I could do it. It got to the point where it didn’t hurt anymore.”
As French-German theologian Albert Schweitzer noted “one who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which one can overcome adversity.”
Macomber developed the strength to overcome adversity. Are you?