The Big Book Of Inspiring Stories Plr Ebook

Table Of Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1: Success Stories Of Great People And Inspiring Leaders

Chapter 2: Overcoming Adversity

Chapter 3: Timeless Inspirational Tales

Chapter 4: Inspirational Women Stories From Around The World

Chapter 5: Teachings And Lessons From Animals

Wrapping Up

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Chapter 2: Overcoming Adversity

Oprah Winfrey – No one ever blames Oprah Winfrey for taking some easy way out. Although her childhood was full of toil, this young girl from Kosciusko, Mississippi always believed she was destined to be someone great.

Maybe it was from her life background in a village that she learned “to turn misery into wisdom” as she stated later. And her misery was not just a few. She was born as she resulted of a free intercourse between her mother and a service man who then left her. First Oprah was brought up by her grandmother in a pig farm with no running water facility. She then lived with her mother who moved to Milwaukee where she was sexually abused for the first time by a friend of her family and her own relative. Oprah grew up into a rebellious teenager, at 14 years old she lived in a bad surroundings and gave birth to a male baby that died a week later. Loosing her patience, Oprah’s mother sent her to live with her father – a man she never knew before.

But it was by living with her father that she eventually got the discipline she needed to turn her outstanding intelligence into its right track. She was doing well at school and was known for her smart talking. She joined a local beauty contest and won a scholarship in Tennessee State University. She began to study broadcast communication and got a part time job as a reporter in Nashville TV station.

Suddenly it looked like nothing could ever stop the strides of this young girl she once was a naughty girl. Oprah left school at the age as young as 19 years old to become the first Afro-American woman broadcaster in Nashville. She wrestled with this job for three years before she took another job in Baltimore Broadcasting Station – where there were larger market segment and greater prestige and challenge as well. This step later proved to be the biggest blessing in disguise mistake Oprah had made.

Oprah was usually calm and self controlled in her previous job, but now she looked so exhausted. She forgot to read the text copy prior to her appearance before the camera. She misspelled “blasé” and misplaced Barbados to be somewhere in California and made a small laugh at that incident. She interviewed a fire victim with such style as asking “How did you feel after the ordeal?” then wept in front of the camera and apologized for exploiting woman’s emotion.

The station management did not appreciate her attitude in front of the camera and they didn’t like her appearance either. They complained about her hair style, her big nose and the distance between her eyes. Tempted to glamorize her appearance, they sent her to a good salon in New York which did a disastrous remodeling that made her fair fall off. Failing to find a suitable wig, she managed to appear on the camera (then she said: “You will learn a lot about yourself if you are baldheaded, a black and a news broadcaster in Baltimore”)

In one year her glory was to be unpredictably coming. The station had had enough of this new figure. They decided she just didn’t fit to TV news broadcasting job. But to avoid breaking her contract, they choose not to fire her but lowered her position from broadcaster to presenter of a talk show for housewives called “People Are Talking” run at daytime.

Oprah said, “Failure is the way God chooses to remind you that you are on the wrong track”. But clearly she is now on the right track about her first day on the talk show “it is like a breath of relief, and it is exactly what you must feel”. The show was a prime show and most of the audience were women who found themselves reflected in the figure of that simple, direct, funny and human presenter.

Seven years later, Oprah’s show attracted a station in Chicago and she was offered to move there to direct the A. M. Chicago show. In a month, she made that show the most loveable show. In 1985 the show was further developed and given a new name: The Oprah Winfrey Show and is now nationally broadcasted.

During more than 15 years of unpredicted success, Oprah keep sharing many things, including her own struggle and success affairs: going on a diet against too much food and fat (she eventually got her ideal weight), a law suit by a ranch owner (which she won), the “TV Garbage” program which dominates her market segment (she soared up and achieved highest rating). Even after all she had been through, she refused to see her failures as mistakes. “I don’t believe in failure” Oprah said. “It is not a failure if you enjoy the process”.

Once upon a time, a farmer owned an old mule who tripped and fell into the farmer’s well. The farmer heard the mule braying and was unable to figure out how to bring up the old animal. It grieved him that he could not pull the animal out. He’d been a good worker around the farm. Although the farmer sympathized with the mule, he called his neighbors together and told them what had happened. He had them help haul dirt to bury the old mule in the well and quietly put him out of his misery.

At first, the old mule was puzzled, but as the farmer and his neighbors continued shoveling and the dirt hit his back, he had a thought: he ought to shake off the dirt and step up. And he did just that.

“Shake it off and step up…shake it off and step up…shake it off and step up.” Even though he took painful blows of dirt and fought panic, he just kept right on shaking it off and stepping up!

It wasn’t long before the old mule stepped up and over the lip of that well. What could have buried him actually blessed him…all because of the manner in which he handled his adversity.

Once upon a time, a daughter complained to her father that her life was miserable and that she didn’t know how she was going to make it. She was tired of fighting and struggling all the time. It seemed just as one problem was solved, another one soon followed.

Her father, a chef, took her to the kitchen. He filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire. Once the three pots began to boil, he placed potatoes in one pot, eggs in the second pot, and ground coffee beans in the third pot. He then let them sit and boil, without saying a word to his daughter.

The daughter moaned and impatiently waited, wondering what he was doing. After twenty minutes, he turned off the burners. He took the potatoes out of the pot and placed them in a bowl. He pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl. He then ladled the coffee out and placed it in a cup.