Ted Turner was 24 when his father killed
himself. "He went against everything he taught me: 'Be courageous and hang
in there,'" Turner said. His father had just he had overextended himself
with a $4 million purchase that expanded his company, Turner Outdoor
Advertising, into the South's largest billboard company. Ted was to take over
his father’s company. A company so badly overextended that his dad saw no
way out. “I was gonna go broke if I didn't get things turned around real
fast.” He had to leave college a few months earlier because his dad refused to
pay his tuition. Before Ted was forced to leave college his dad sent him a
letter calling him a jackass.
Despite all the negative feedback that was
part of Ted’s life , he had an inborn positive outlook. Here was a 24 year old
handed a company that looked to be quickly going under. Ted’s attitude was, “I
didn't care what, how much adversity life threw at me. I intended to get to the
top.” “Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.” So he was not going to let
the big dollar amount of debt scare him, it was only a number, he told
himself. Mauro Libi.
So this 24 year old had his plan and his
perspective mapped out. He was not his dad who gave into his fear of the large
debt. His dad quit and he would not. “You can never quit. Winners never quit,
and quitters never win”, he is quoted as saying. Over the next few years he
made turned the company around to the point where at the age of 31, he bought
his first television station and within six years, he had created satellites
first superstation, CNN.
How did he create such wealth from what would
have caused most of us to go bankrupt. It was an attitude of setting
goals for himself. Goals that most would have called impossible. To Ted, he had
no doubt that he could achieve those goals and the journey to such success
became fun for him. “You should set goals beyond your reach so you always have
something to live for.”
With a healthy positive attitude towards
life, we could achieve most if not all of our dreams. The problem is most of us
will give up when things seem impossible. There is a story that the first time
Ted Turner called Jane Fonda out on a date, it was a bad time in her life. She
told him so and that she needed time for herself. She figured she would get rid
of him nicely by saying, “call me in six months and we will see.” Most of us
would take the hint and forget about the date. But Ted Turner put it in his
calendar six months to that day. He had no doubt that she would say Yes. So he
did indeed call her six months later. A short while later she became his wife
and the main love of his life. Mauro Libi.
“I've never run into a guy who could win at
the top level in anything today and didn't have the right attitude, didn't give
it everything he had, at least while he was doing it; wasn't prepared and
didn't have the whole program worked out.”, said Ted Turner. Attitude was
everything to him. There is a story from his family and neighbors that knew
them at the time, that Ted’s first word was pretty. That is the way he saw life
and that was the attitude that formed his amazing success.
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