Building Leadership Qualities in an EA: Being Passionate about the business
I purposed the title intentionally to help you guess the theme of today’s Inspiration Message and rightly so. In 1971, a young man was graded C for an idea he wrote on a research paper at Yale and was discouraged regarding the idea. What happened after is life changing and not just for him but for the entire world. Yes, we call that idea as FedEX today and as surprising as this information maybe for you, what’s more interesting to the story is he never agreed to what others say about him but stood at the helm believing in himself. Born in the same year as John Paul Dejoria, our previous edition inspiration page, Fred Smith also became a successful entrepreneur. His Father, James smith was a founder of a transport company (later merged into greyhound, the common transport in the US) died when he was just 4 years old.
Raised by Mom and his’ uncles, Fred struggled with bone disease through his initial childhood. But the man is a fighter and highly optimistic and never let the situation get to him. The initial tougher phase helped shape him into a gridlock which no weapon could break. He finally finshed his bachelors in economics from Yale and joined the US Marine Cops. Though Fred was completely involved in the ground operations, his vision for transportation and the paper graded ‘C’ never faded. He spent quality time in the Military logistics system to understand the delivery chain and the logistic life cycle.
Fred believed that by transporting Mail and packages via land through trucks or through spare space in a passenger aircraft, the process becomes inefficient, delayed and therefore expensive. He invested in aircrafts and starts Federal Express (FedEX). Though much of the funding was inheritance and venture capital, there was also a story that he was denied a loan and took 5000$ to Las Vegas and gambled on blackjack and make that 27000 $ to fund his business.
Great things happen when you believe in yourself! You always feel that you are unable to make the most in life and if you dissect the problem, you would notice that most of the blame goes to the fact that you believed then the world graded you as a failure. The reality is that the world disqualified everyone who later became very successful in life. So failures are indeed stepping stones to success.