I like stories like these. Stories about instant, overnight success.
I remember hearing an interview with Clint Black, the country singer once, maybe it was on the Biography Channel. He explained how he had worked on his music career for several years, I think it was something like 10 years, trying to get a break. After 10 years in the business he was finally able to get an agent and so he thought his big break was just around the corner. The agent sent him out to play in "honky tonks" for 8 more years before he recorded his first album. Clint said that he hated playing in those dives and many times seriously considered quitting and getting a real job.
Papa Hagin used to tell the story about when he was pastoring a particularly contentious church, the deacons used to get into fist fights in front of the church kind of contentious. He said he’d come home Sunday nights crawl into bed with Oretha and tell her, "Let’s just load up the our stuff and take off. Nobody will even know we’re gone." There were other times when he was on the road in a traveling ministry where he’d plead with God to let him quit so he could get a job and take care of his family. He said he’d tell God that he could go work as an usher in a church. That he’d be the best usher a pastor ever had. But in the end he felt he had to continue doing what God had called him to do. Dad Hagin would then say that when people ask him how he stays so steady and unflustered he responds that, "I was perfected by the things which I suffered," referring to 1 Peter 5:10.
Seth Godin has an interesting post about how the Beatles became an instant overnight success. Here’s a little blurb:
I was looking through a day by day biography of the group last night, and it quickly became clear that the image that we have of the four youngsters running away from their screaming fans didn’t happen overnight.
At the beginning, they were playing two or three clubs a day, dives, making a few pounds if they were lucky. Not for a month or two, but for years and years.
Read the rest here.