The Measure of Success is not about the Status It is About the Man

  Most of us spend our entire life chasing that rainbow. You know the one that has the pot of gold at the end of it. We forget to stop and remember that we really don’t need that elusive pot of gold be considered successful. We forget that the small things in our lives is what makes us successful. Every obstacle overcome is yet another success.

  I did not fully understand this until I really and truly looked at a person who I have known and loved all my life. He was never given a chance to succeed when he was little. My mother was told to put him away from society and to forget about him because he had no worth. You see he was retarded. Now, before all of you bleeding hearts get all excited and tell that it is politically incorrect, I will tell you  that you are wrong. I  along with my three other siblings lived it. That is what the “stigma” was titled.

  You see Stan was born in 1952. There were no resources for the challenged. They were put away so as not to be a burden on society. But my mother and father refused to bow down to that stigma. They kept him at home and taught him how to be successful. Stan was never supposed to be anything but a vegtable. He was never supposed to do any of the things we do without thinking. But he did. Not only did he do those things but he went to school something that was unheard of at that time. Not only did he go to school but he also graduated in 1973 from high school.

  He has been in the public work sector since he was 16 years old. All of these things are successes. He is now 60 years old and has done things that many said he would never do. He has succeeded because he believed he could. His story Dream Catcher Failure Was Never An Option is my tribute to him. It is his story. It is his gift to the world. It is a lesson in how to measure one’s success.

  Stan truly believes that the measure of success is not in how much money one makes – but the fact that one has the ablity to make that money. He refuses to live of the handouts of the Government even though he would qualify. He has said, “I want to make my own money not get a government check.”  That is a measure of success.

  His measure of sucess is the fact that to have tried is successful, but not to have tried is failure. His ablity to believe in who he is – what he is about and to believe that anything is possible is his measure of succees.

   He never sells himself short as most of us do. He always believes in who he is and what he wants. How sad that a man who is retarded has a better grasp on life and the meaning of success than most of us do. How sad that a man who is retarded believes that it is the mountains we climb are our success even if we tumble down them time after time after time.

   Each of us can take lessons from thei wonderful man who believes he has succeeded.      

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVc0QOj5FQA

http://indieauthoryvonnemason.com/