I tried to become an actor on a whim at the age of 28 with no training in college or otherwise, based on the belief I was beautiful, when there were hundreds of other guys who looked as good as if not better than me. I knew nothing of the scarcity of work for actors or what it takes to be successful. You have to be willing to park cars for 12 years to make an income while you try to “make it,” and most hopefuls don’t.
Despite this ignorance and silliness, despite my total unpreparedness and ineptitude, I appeared on the TV show General Hospital as a gangster and in a David Carradine sci fi biker flick, Deathsport.
I was actually called in to try out for a Tarzan movie starring Bo Derek and didn’t get it. A much better looking man did. I could have been the first pot-bellied ethnic-looking Tarzan but hey, how many men do you know who could claim to have tried for such a role at all?
Making a living at this? It was clear I wasn’t.
Then I decided to become a writer. I didn’t know much about this either, but I was really determined this time. I wanted to do something creative, something notable and interesting. I did not want to be the salesman that I was.
Have you ever heard the saying, he or she is a “late bloomer?”
First of all, don’t make the dreadful mistake of thinking that you have ownership of misfortune because no matter how bad you think your life is, there are other people out there millions of them who have it much worse. You learn to be thankful for what you have.
It took me a long time to realize this.
I used to think of my life as somewhat of a disaster. I’m not going to dwell on the negative, but I used to have two sayings, “This wouldn’t happen to anyone but me,” and, “Nobody has bad job experiences more than me.”
I was in sales and had jobs literally one after another where the bosses were often dishonest and abusive. The boss would set a sales goal for you impossible to achieve because they were greedy. The only way to make the sales goal was to cheat the customer by selling them more than they needed.
Because I was honest I didn’t sell as much as the more crooked salesmen. I would only raise the customer up 10 percent to renew their product/service for the year over what they paid last year. Other sale people would raise them 80 percent.
At sales meetings, these 80 percent sharks would get applause. I was greeted by stony silence. The company bosses would start the process of getting rid of me.
I’m the only person you’ve ever met who was wrongly forced out of a job, started up a new company with others from scratch which became a success; that company was purchased by the same company that earlier forced me out of my job and then I was forced out of my job again.
Forced out twice by the same people.
I had to learn to laugh at this, which was the beginning of the new life of me.
I had always wanted to be a writer. Long before computers I began writing a book in the old-fashioned way with a typewriter. While I was working in these sales jobs I didn’t like, I would sit in my garage at night and write out a 120,000-word novel, much of it nonfiction, with pen and paper, free-hand.
Then I typed it on a typewriter. Anyone who has not had the experience of typing a book using white paint called white-out to cover typo errors, and then endlessly typing it all over again page by page (400 pages) to get it error-free, doesn’t realize the depth of commitment. Regardless of the book’s quality, this alone was quite an achievement.
Then mailing the book out to publishing houses in big manila envelopes only to have it rejected time and again and returned in an envelope placed inside the mailed envelope, and paying the postage back and forth---this should earn someone a medal for endurance.
This book is today for sale at Amazon.
Here’s the point. It took me until I was 65 to become a full time successful freelance writer achieving royalties from my books. I worked at it in my spare time at night and on weekends for 35 years.
I hung in there. I never let the negative sales jobs destroy my desire or the sense of who I thought I could be. I never gave up. But I realize today even when I faced adversity I was a lot better off than millions of other people.
I am blessed. It took about 50 years for me to realize it.
If you haven’t already, you should realize that you are blessed too. I believe I am a better person today than I was when I was 40 or 20, more level-headed, less selfish; even less cowardly.
I’ll fess up. I went from being a person who despises himself to a person who is proud even with the figurative warts, the weaknesses, I still have.
You too can feel good about your life.
How you view yourself is of enormous importance and you can have the wrong idea about yourself. Your interpretation of yourself, your worth, your value as a human being if it’s a negative image, is all in your head.