No Excuses!

Sparkplugging is starting a new tradition called ‘Spark an Idea Thursday’. Each week we’ll be sharing some great ideas for a topic of interest to our readers. We invite you to grab our image and carry the tradition through to your own blog! If you do, please link back to this post so we know where you were inspired!

This week we’re Sparking an Idea from the Movies…

There are a lot of movies that inspire and motivate people, but the one that really hit home for me was The Pursuit of Happyness (that’s not a typo).

It’s the story of Chris Gardner, a high school graduate not making it as a bone density scanner salesman. If this movie were fiction, you’d find it hard to believe  that so much bad could happen to a person without breaking him. And yet he did overcome to reach huge business success!During the course of the movie Chris loses 2 bone density scanners though he eventually gets them back. His girlfriend (and son’s mother) leaves, and he gets evicted. The day before an important interview for the stock broker intern program at Dean Witter, he’s arrested for outstanding parking tickets. He pays the fine, but he’s held overnight in jail until the check clears. As a result, he goes to his interview in a sweat jacket, no shirt, and paint all over his body. Despite the odds, he earns one of the 20 spots in the program and then learns that only one of the twenty will be hired, and the six month training is not paid.

Even so he accepts the internship, taking classes during the day, and selling scanners (with his son in tow) on the weekends. Right when things seem to be going well, the IRS takes his last $600 leaving him and his son homeless. The family shelter won’t take him because it’s for women and children only. He does get into Glide’s shelter, but not before having to spend a night in the bathroom of a BART station.

And still he rises*.

He eventually gets the job. And within 6 years starts his own successful firm.

Movies like this always have me asking, “Would I have been able to overcome all that adversity? Or would I have let it keep me down?” I’m terribly afraid I wouldn’t have persevered. I often get tripped up with things like fatigue, lack of confidence, disappointment, a sinking economy, bad weather, and … laziness. Chris starts at the end of the rope (a frayed end at that) and reaches the roof. My life has been no where as difficult and yet I still let the small stuff slow me down.

Chris’ story serves as a reminder that we can have and do great things in this world if we don’t let the “stuff” get us down. He set his sights on something better for himself and his son, and by sacrifice, hard work, and commitment he did it. How about you? Are you letting obstacles keep you from your goal? If so, watch the Pursuit of Happyness. It is the ultimate excuse buster!

* From Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise.