Keep her lit, don’t give up the fight!
By Jonathan Acton - jonathan.acton@homeinstead.ie
For anyone reading this article who has ever faced struggles, set-backs or seemingly insurmountable challenges over the years, try to take some solace from this tale. It might not be today or tomorrow that you find your calling, but as they say, every dog has its day.
Bear with me while I profile the struggles of a person who has now become a household name.
I was quite surprised to learn the following but it certainly inspired me to think the value that people have to add to the world after they retire, or not, as the case may be.
At 5, this boy’s father sadly passed away.
At the age of 16, he left school without any inclination of what direction he wanted his life to go.
By the age of 17, he had already managed to start and lose five full-time jobs.
However, he decided to settle down and get married aged 18.
He worked as a driver for a couple of years but managed to lose that job also.
Then he decided to join the army as he thought there was no way he could fail in that, but his application was rejected!
Following that rare setback, he decided to try to enter judicial school – but, you’ve guessed it – the computer said no.
All was not lost, as he saw light at the end of the tunnel when offered a job as an insurance sales man.
He felt his fortune was about to change then, but obviously his intuition was way off because he soon lost that job too.
The misery continued when his wife left him when he was 25, taking his only daughter.
He fought to get his daughter back, but, not surprisingly, lost that battle too. Forty years later, the man retired at 65 after a string of jobs.
On the day of his retirement, the American government gave him $105.
He knew he could not keep himself with that amount of money, and he even contemplated suicide considering his lifetime of failures.
He then sat under a tree and began to write his goodbyes to the world, and realised there was something he had still not tried.
Cooking!
He had waited on tables, washed dishes and swept floors, but gad never tried his hand at cooking.
With the dollars Uncle Sam had given him, he bought a fryer and made fried chicken with a recipe that his grandmother taught him.
He went selling it door to door in his town, and slowly began to branch out into other areas.
By the age of 88 Colonel Sanders, founder of KFC, was a billionaire.
It’s incredible to think of all the setbacks Mr Sanders suffered throughout his life, and how he seemed to realise his potential in his ‘retirement’ years.
To quote the colonel himself: "I am against retiring, the thing that keeps a man alive is having something to do."
What do plan on doing when you retire?
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