Mark Twain, Michael Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Bob Dylan, and John Wayne All Sucked.
Famous or not, these guys were just awful.
Mark Twain was a miserable financial failure who wasted several decades of his life barely surviving while first running a print shop and later mining for silver in Nevada.
Michael Jordan was such a bad baseball player that his very poor batting average of .202 only got him a spot playing with the Birmingham Barons, a double-a (AA) minor league White Sox affiliate.
Sylvester Stallone’s dramatic novel “Paradise Alley” was such an utter failure that one book reviewer said:
“…an amateurish piece of writing… the text reads like an exercise in the proletariat fiction of a genre ago, sans taste, sans talent, sans everything.”
Bob Dylan’s book “Tarantula” was so strange, so amorphous, and so unexpected that the original sales figures are nearly impossible to find, and even some of Dylan’s biggest fans may not even know it ever existed. Its free-flowing experimental style boggles the mind and includes stream-of-consciousness poetry with such wild zingers as:
“…now’s not the time to act silly, so wear your big boots & jump on the garbage clowns.”
John Wayne was probably the worst actor to ever play Genghis Khan when he starred in the Howard Hughes film “The Conqueror.” The movie was so bad that it’s referred to by some as “the worst movie of all time.” It’s only made worse by the fact that it was filmed next to a nuclear waste dump, and there’s evidence that this may have caused almost 50 cast and crew members to develop cancer.
Okay, Obviously, I’m not really saying all these people sucked.
Not entirely.
I’m saying that even some of the world’s greatest musicians, actors, athletes, and writers have sucked at some point in their lives.
But that’s okay. We forgive them for it, and they move on to bigger and better things.
Mark Twain eventually left his failed mining operation and, ironically, struck it rich later in life when, in his 40s, he wrote the hits “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Michael Jordan, as you already know, was one of the greatest basketball players in the history of the game and doesn’t even need any background or introduction here to prove it.
Sylvester Stallone wrote his novel, which bombed right between the massive international super-successful films Rocky and Rocky II.
Bob Dylan was, of course, one of the most influential musicians and poets of the 20th century, eventually winning both a Pulitzer Prize and a Nobel Prize in Literature (and is still the only musician to achieve this feat).
John Wayne, like him or not, starred in more than 150 films in a career that lasted five decades and culminated in him receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Whenever I think, “I suck at this,” I try hard to think about people like these. It may just be that I suck at what I’m doing right now, and I’ll find something better down the road.
Or maybe I’m still putting in the boring, tedious legwork it takes to learn the right combination of skills that will eventually blend to become something incredible someday.
Either way, I’m still here, and I’m not giving up. I’ll find my thing eventually. We all will.