What's Your Story?
Do you remember the pivotal moment when your foot first felt the path you walk?
My moment came when Charlie Myers grasped my hand, slapped a ten-dollar bill into it and said, “I think it's a great idea and I want to help. Do it.” Then someone called his name from the other side of the church and Charlie left me with a thorny choice:
1. Do the thing I had suggested.
2. Give Charlie back his ten dollars and say, “I was just yammering.”
Truth is I'd been complaining to Charlie about the sanctimonious whiners who recorded the daily Dial-a-Prayer messages in our town, hoping that Charlie would volunteer to record a better one. “Somebody ought to do something,” I said, “Those messages are depressing.”
Cheerful Charlie was a famous radio personality and I was an uneducated steelworker, so I felt certain he'd volunteer to record something interesting for guys like me to ponder each day. But Charlie didn't take the bait. Now with his ten dollars in my hand, I stood there thinking about his instructions. Finally I said, “Why not? How hard can it really be?”
Answering machines weren't sold to the general public in 1978, so the following week I rented a mammoth Code-A-Phone 111 unit from the telephone company, an “announce only” machine that required Pennie and me to add a second phone line into our home.
That's when I began writing these little love notes to the world.
Soon a second machine was required on a rollover line because too many people were getting a busy signal. The telephone lines and the Code-A-Phone units were costing me $138 a month to rent – pretty steep when you make only $5 an hour – but I never solicited funds. I didn't want to become one of those guys.
“Take a break in your day, dial Daybreak,” was how I promoted my little telephone Thought-for-the-Day in all the shopper papers. Daybreak later became the Monday Morning Memos and those became a series of bestselling books.
So that's my story.
What put you on the path to where you are now? Who was with you and how did it happen? Think back, because I'm collecting stories for a new book about how the biggest decisions in our lives often arrive in the form of choices that seemed tiny at the time.
Can I convince you to write me 500 to 800 words about the series of events that brought you to where you are now? If your mom says it's okay for you to come out and play, click to www.PeopleStories.org and I'll tell you more about it.
Ciao for Niao,
Roy H. Williams
| Q: | What's the difference between Advertising and Public Relations? |
| A: | Advertising is what you buy from the sales department. P.R. is what you get for free from the News Department. Which of the two do you suppose has greater credibility and impact? |
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