Every person in your downline who’s about to quit is standing exactly where Terry stood.
Terry L. Fossum grew up in McAllen, Texas — at the time, the poorest city in the United States — surrounded by gangs and drugs. As a boy, he stared down the barrel of a gun in his own back alley. In high school, his father was killed. Before he died, a neighbor said something to his dad that Terry never forgot:
“Those three boys of yours — not a single one of them will ever grow up to be anything.”
So Terry set out to prove him wrong. He started a business. And he was, in his own words, terrible at it. He did what the farmer in the parable did — he found people to teach him how to build the bridge. He read every book, ran every audiotape, worked every seminar. Positive visualization. Manifestation. Writing down his goals. And still, he says, there was always a missing piece of the puzzle.
He tried and failed. Tried and failed. Until one day he didn’t have it in him to try anymore. He walked into the bathroom, looked himself in the mirror, and heard the neighbor’s voice:
“He’s right. You’re never going to grow up to be anything.”
And then something turned. “No. I refuse. For the memory of my father, if nothing else — I refuse to let that son of a gun be right.” A fire lit up inside him. He got up, brushed himself off, and got back at it. He hit the same setbacks as before — but this time he had the missing piece. Not just the carrot, the positive picture he’d never quite believed. Now he also had the stick: something to push him forward when the carrot didn’t do the trick.
That business he’d failed at, quit, been sure he couldn’t do? He went on to become part of the top fraction of 1% of his entire industry in the world. People started asking what he was doing. So he taught them. Before long he had rooms full of people coming to learn from him — and some of the top names in science, business, and self-improvement endorsed the work of the guy who’d never grow up to be anything.
