Chicken Soup for the Soul 20th Anniversary Edition (27 page)

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

~George Bernard Shaw

There is an unseen life that dreams us.

It knows our true direction and destiny. We can trust ourselves more than we realize and we need have no fear of change.

~John O’Donohue

I
was a 22-year-old hotshot — or so I thought. As a publicist for NBC News in New York — the youngest ever, I was told — I was making enough money to rent a nice apartment near Lincoln Center, enjoy manicures and pedicures on weekends, eat out and shop. Not bad for a nice Jewish girl from Miami Beach who had always dreamed of making it in the Big Apple.

I was on a first-name basis with some of the biggest names in broadcast news: Jane Pauley, Maria Shriver and the late Tim Russert. At some point those boldface names benefited from my publicity skills. It was heady stuff and I was on a roll. I envisioned a long and happy career at NBC’s iconic 30 Rock headquarters.

Then NBC News hired a new division president. He planned to make big changes, or so I learned abruptly one day when I got a call from a human resources representative who told me to report to the new boss’s office. When I walked in, he was sitting behind his big desk. He didn’t get up to greet me. Not a good sign.

He clasped his hands behind his head, leaned back in his leather chair and told me that anytime someone took over a company or a division, he or she would want to put his or her mark on things — new protocols, new processes, and a new team.

The light dawned. “Are you firing me?” I interrupted.

“You have 30 minutes to leave the building,” he said, matter-of-factly.

My world was crashing, so I quickly went into spin mode, using all the skills I had learned as a high school debate champ. I told him he was making a terrible mistake, and I listed the reasons. I told him that if he talked to anyone internally and externally they would say what a great asset I was, that I really knew my stuff, and that I was one thousand percent committed to NBC News.

He looked at his watch.

Desperate, I asked him to give me a chance to prove myself. “Give me three things to accomplish in three weeks, three months — any timeframe you decide — to prove myself directly to you.” All I wanted, I said, was to stay at NBC News.

His response? “You now have 25 minutes to leave the building.” Game over. As I stood up to walk out of his office — trying desperately not to burst into tears — his parting words of wisdom were, “Tory, it’s a big world out there, and I suggest you go explore it.”

I left in shock. My world as I had known it had come to an end. I thought my career was over. I didn’t even get to pack up my office. It was done for me and my boxes were messengered to my apartment later that day.

I walked home, climbed into my pajamas and threw myself an old-fashioned pity party, catered by Haagen-Dazs. The entertainment? Daytime TV, long conversations with my mom in Florida, and lots of sleepless nights filled with self-doubt, wondering what would become of me. My party turned into a misery marathon for months, financed by severance pay, unemployment benefits and a cashed-out 401(k) — something only someone naïve in her twenties would think was a great idea.

With a cool $23,000 in my checking account, going to the ATM never felt scary. That is, until one day I stood at a Citibank machine, stunned that I had run out of money. I’m not sure why a smart girl like me was so surprised: when nothing’s coming in and it’s all going out, it’s inevitable that the funds dry up.

I realized I had two choices: pack my bags and move back home to Miami Beach or snap out of my funk and get another job.

Having no desire to go backwards, I took stock of my situation. First, I told myself: nothing lasts forever. All jobs are temporary and nobody holds onto the same role forever. Second, sometimes you can do everything right and still lose your job. And third, you can take away my business cards, my corporate ID and my paycheck, but
nobody
can strip me of my skills or experience, or my friends and colleagues who’d vouch for me and my talent. Once I discovered that — and truly believed it — it took me just weeks to get hired.

As I began my new job, I reflected on other key lessons, which most notably was that I control my self-worth — and it’s up to me to project what I want others to see. It’s not about job title or place of employment. It’s about me and all that I’m capable of doing, giving and achieving.

I also realized that I never wanted to be on someone else’s payroll — to leave my destiny in someone else’s hands. I resented the notion that, despite all my hard work and commitment, an arrogant man in a suit could take away my paycheck and attempt to rob me of my dignity and self-worth. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t stomach the specter of getting fired again.

The permanent scar of a pink slip convinced me that I’d feel best running my own shop and signing my own paycheck. I’d bank exclusively on
me.
Everything would be up to
me.
That concept is terrifying for many people, but I found it exhilarating. I still do. It was the most freeing personal move I could have made. Ask anyone who has quit corporate America to go out on their own and many will say the same thing.

~Tory Johnson

Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.

~Henry Ford

R
ocky Lyons, the son of New York Jets defensive end Marty Lyons, was five years old when he was driving through rural Alabama with his mother, Kelly. He was asleep on the front seat of their pickup truck, with his feet resting on her lap.

As his mom drove carefully down the winding two-lane country road, she turned onto a narrow bridge. As she did, the truck hit a pothole and slid off the road, and the right front wheel got stuck in a rut. Fearing the truck would tip over, she attempted to jerk it back up onto the road by pressing hard on the gas pedal and spinning the steering wheel to the left. But Rocky’s foot got caught between her leg and the steering wheel and she lost control of the pickup truck.

The truck flipped over and over down a 20-foot ravine. When it hit bottom, Rocky woke up. “What happened, Mama?” he asked. “Our wheels are pointing toward the sky.”

Kelly was blinded by blood. The gearshift had jammed into her face, ripping it open from lip to forehead. Her gums were torn out, her cheeks pulverized, her shoulders crushed. With one shattered bone sticking out of her armpit, she was pinned against the crushed door.

“I’ll get you out, Mama,” announced Rocky, who had miraculously escaped injury. He slithered out from under Kelly, slid through the open window and tried to yank his mother out. But she didn’t move.

“Just let me sleep,” begged Kelly, who was drifting in and out of consciousness.

“No, Mama,” Rocky insisted. “You can’t go to sleep.”

Rocky wriggled back into the truck and managed to push Kelly out of the wreckage. He then told her he’d climb up to the road and stop a car to get help. Fearing that no one would be able to see her little boy in the dark, Kelly refused to let him go alone. Instead they slowly crept up the embankment, with Rocky using his meager 40-pound frame to push his 104-pound mother. They crawled inches at a time. The pain was so great that Kelly wanted to give up, but Rocky wouldn’t let her.

To urge his mother on, Rocky told her to think “about that little train,” the one in the classic children’s story,
The Little Engine That Could,
which managed to get up a steep mountain. To remind her, Rocky kept repeating his version of the story’s inspirational phrase: “I know you can, I know you can.”

When they finally reached the road, Rocky was able to see his mother’s torn face clearly for the first time. He broke into tears. Waving his arms and pleading, “Stop! Please stop!” the boy hailed a truck. “Get my mama to a hospital,” he implored the driver.

It took 8 hours and 344 stitches to rebuild Kelly’s face. She looks quite different today — “I used to have a straight long nose, thin lips and high cheekbones; now I’ve got a pug nose, flat cheeks and much bigger lips” — but she has few visible scars and has recovered from her injuries.

Rocky’s heroics were big news. But the spunky youngster insists he didn’t do anything extraordinary. “It’s not like I wanted it to happen,” he explains. “I just did what anyone would have done.”

Says his mother, “If it weren’t for Rocky, I’d have bled to death.”

~First heard from Michele Borba

Optimism is the foundation of courage.

~Nicholas Murray Butler

D
onna’s fourth-grade classroom looked like many others I had seen in the past. Students sat in five rows of six desks. The teacher’s desk was in the front and faced the students. The bulletin board featured student work. In most respects it appeared to be a traditional elementary classroom. Yet something seemed different that day I entered it for the first time. There seemed to be an undercurrent of excitement.

Donna was a veteran small-town Michigan schoolteacher only two years away from retirement. In addition she was a volunteer participant in a county-wide staff development project I had organized and facilitated. The training focused on language arts ideas that would empower students to feel good about themselves and take charge of their lives. Donna’s job was to attend training sessions and implement the concepts being presented. My job was to make classroom visitations and encourage implementation.