Always tough to achieve in life.

Some of us think that one is lucky if one is born in a business family so that after graduating one can straightaway take over the family business. That is not always the case as the following examples show:-:

One of the most interesting vocation stories are with respect to Henri Ford. Ford’s father was a farmer who wanted his son to follow him in his own footsteps. However young Hernri’s heart was with the motor engine and similar things with which he tinkered. After furious arguments with his father, he left to chart his own course to create history by becoming one of the world’s richest entrepreneurs. The lesson to learn here is that one has to see where one’s spontaneous inclination lies and then have the courage and conviction to back is up. 

Much later in life, Henri Ford brought into ford a person who could concentrate on all other areas except for manufacturing which was Henri’s forte. Henri ford was regarded as a business genius in his time. This shows that even geniuses have to indulge in complimentary synergies- supplement their own strength and complement their weaknesses.
The other example is that of Akio Morita who became Sony’s Chairman. Though he did not have any arguments with his father, being the eldest in the family, he was expected to take over the family business of brewing sake, a Japensese drink. However, Morita’s interest lay in electronics which is where he went. He created one of the world’s biggest companies in partnership with another person.

In one of Dale Carnegie’s books there is the example of one person whose father has a laundry business. His father was ashamed of his son because he had no interest in work and was lazy and indifferent. However the son wanted to become a mechanic and used to do that work endlessly. He pursued his heart and went on to become chairman of Boeing.

Thomas Edison had no father’s business but he used to work 18 hours a day and yet say that he didn’t work in his life as it was all fun.

The best example in recent times is the richest man in the world, Mr Bill Gates who left his Harvard studies midway to follow his heart and that is what made him the richest man in the world. This would obviously not happen with everyone but what one has to learn is to know exactly what one wants to do. Sometime back, Bill Gates made Steve Ballamer CEO and designated himself chief software Architect to focus on his real love, software design. This is similar to what Henri ford did. 

Another example is Michael Dell who had a passion for selling computers and competing with IBM which led to the formation of Dell corporation while he was only 19.

It would not be out of place to mention an Indian story. Alyque Padamsee, the former chairman of Lintas has written a book called “The double life”. In that he describes how he used to do advertisements for money which used to fund his real passion which was theatre. He had to sacrifice a lot of social life for this “double life” but this story clearly shows that one has to follow one’s heart more than one’s head for the choice of one’s career.

It can be concluded that passion alone determines what one should or should not be doing because it enables one to overcome all obstacles.

Too short to dance

Couldn’t she smile? If only she were taller. They loved her kicking, but … Like thousands of other young women, Twyla Tharp came to New York City with big dreams. The self-described Indiana farm girl enrolled at Barnard College to get a degree in art history. But her real passion, her real obsession, was dance.

To meet the college’s phys ed requirement, she studied dance with the legendary Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. Soon she was fitting her schoolwork in between two or three dance classes a day. A dream was born. But dance is not exactly a surefire, lifelong profession.

When she graduated in the mid-1960s, she auditioned for commercials and tried out for roles — but she just didn’t seem to fit in anywhere. She lacked the technical skills to be a ballerina, and she discovered in a big audition that she was too short for the Rockettes. They “loved my kicking and 52 fouett&eacutes on pointe,” she wrote in her autobiography Push Comes to Shove, “but couldn’t I please smile?” And she also learned she was “too small in every direction to work as a Latin Quarter show girl, but I still tried.” And Tharp wondered, Will I ever be a dancer? Do I have any business dancing? The only way to find out, it seemed, was to form her own troupe and create her own style of dance.

For five long years, Tharp and her troupe practiced virtually every day in the basement of a Greenwich Village church. Sometimes the janitors had to “throw them out” on Sunday morning. They worked for little pay and almost no recognition. Constantly, Tharp asked herself, Do you want to do this, or don’t you?

Forty years later, after choreographing over 100 dances on Broadway and in movies like Hair and Ragtime, after winning the National Medal of the Arts in 2004, Tharp still asks herself that question. And the answer is — yes.