Judy Alley: Award winning television writer, columnist and author Steve Young. Joins us to talk about his book “Great Failures of the Extremely Successful”, Steve what do you mean when you say that Webster’s needs to redefine the F word.
Steve Young: Well the F word were talking about of course is the other one, the failure word and that’s because I think the word failure has going to bad wrap usually it’s a negative but the fact is if your really look at it failure is where we start to learn. And everybody especially kids takes a look at failure or mistakes or adversity and get so scared of it that they're almost afraid to risk. If they will take a look at the word failure as a stepping-stone to success, in other words you made a mistake but now what we learned from this. Then all of the sudden its very positive and that I becomes something that you don’t have to be afraid of and in fact something that you're willing to keep trying and trying because we know in the long run you're going to gain from it.
Judy Alley: Whose story from the book did you find most inspiring?
Steve Young: The first person I wanted to call when I knew I was going to do this type of book, its feeling in Jim Marshal. He was a hall of fame laying in ford the Minnesota Vikings for football player and I had seen him over and over and over on a replay run the wrong way for a touchdown and score for the other team. And I thought how humiliating and even to this day I mean years later they're playing it over, how do you deal with something like that. And I talked to him about that and he said “It was humiliating” and the fact that he was just a kid.
What he did is, is he picked up the ball and he saw the goal line and it was clear to get to you know a line that it never gets to score. So it was only a few yards away, he started taking off and all of the sudden he realized that nobody was in front of him and he ended up scoring the half is over and the friends in the line then said “Thank you” and he just realized then that he had scored for the other team.
He went into the locker room he didn’t want to come out; he didn’t want to talk to anybody etcetera. And then he remembered something his father said which is “You know when you're given something make the best of if, anything make the best of it” so he realized that he had to go out there and what he did he play the best half of his life but he still didn’t want to talked about it. The pressman didn’t talked about it afterwards that he’s going for the other team that you know rarely happens.
And he ended up talking about it even though he didn’t want to and telling how he felt. Well he got thousands of letters from people who were talking about it, “I've been hiding the secret, I've been shamed all my life etcetera, etcetera” and they came out with the woodwork and thank him. It led him to a life of the benevolence where he have worked a number of many opulence air funding, humanitarian type of operation for kids, he has helped 10 of thousands of people over the years. He went that direction because of that moment of humiliation.
He wouldn’t have gone in that area and he had no idea he was going to go. So out of this, out of something that pain in his heart, what happened was probably he went and asked for it but the best thing that could have happened.
Judy Alley: We’ve got actors and we've got writer, we've got pro-athletes in this book whatever types of.
Steve Young: Scientist, entertainers, noble price winners, Aaron Brockovich, Jane Goodle very high profile people and people who had the guts to tell me stories they haven’t even told to other people yet about what it was in their life and they could have been kids, they could have been adults when it happened. It could have been about careers, it could have been about relationships, death, loss of petty pedigrees became a quadriplegic, he said you know the become a quadriplegic I saved my life. I wouldn’t have ever ask for it and I wish I could have learned in some other way but this is how I had to learn it and it saved my life. And he’s not the necessarily he would want to be this way, but he realized what the hand he was given.
And he has used that to become a better person and live this life as happy as possible. It can work for a diseases, it can for work for just school, it could work for any business, anything you're trying but the idea and when I wrote great failures. The point was to say how could you take the most traumatic moment in your life that would seem to be so negative and with that use it as a stepping-stone to success.
Judy Alley: Steve thank you so much for joining us today, if you're tried of fighting what life sometimes servers up and would like to find out how you can change it all for the best. Pick up Great Failures of the Extremely Successful. I hear you’ve handed out books to Wall-Street traders and brokers, what was that all about
Steve Young: I said they got to look at things different way because in mark was plummeting that day I went out and handed Great Failures of the Extremely Successful, to every stockbroker that walk in and including Richard Grasso who was the head of the stock market at that time.
That day the stock market went up over 240 points, which was the largest loop in at least 15-years on the stock market. Was it my fault, was it Great Failures the result of that? Yeah, it was, it was because of me handing out the book.
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