Debunking Glurge - On failure and rejection

[ShibbOleth]

Just got this email from a placement firm I have dealings with. While the sentiment is fine, I’m fairly sure there is a lot of exaggeration/falsehood here.

Through the ups and downs of your job search an occasional inspiration might give you what you need to carry on with determination! The following was taken from today’s Business Digest—which was taken from Pushing the Envelope…

*Dr. Seuss was rejected 23 times.
*Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. *Henry Ford went broke 5 times. *The University of Bern rejected Albert Einstein’s Ph.D. dissertation *Winston Churchill took three years to get through 8th grade. Churchill later gave a commencement speech at Oxford consisting of only seven words:“Never give up! Never, never give up!”

I was able to find several sites that claim Jordan was cut from the Varsity as a sophomore, which is hardly earthshattering, IMO, and a bit of a sin of omission as stated above, since it’s fairly rare for any freshman or sophomore to make a varsity sports team.
Are any of the other parts true? The Churchill one strikes me as particularly dubious, but he was a character, maybe he was showing up drunk for classes?

[Exapno_Mapcase]

The one about Einstein is technically true, but so torn from context as to be completely misleading.

From this Einstein chronology:

1905 - Einstein’s “annus mirabilis”. He publishes five groundbreaking works in the “Annalen der Physik”, which revolutionize the basics of physics around 1900. One of his works, Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper (“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”), contains the special theory of relativity. In another work he deduces the famous formula E = mc[sup]2[/sup]. In April Einstein hands in his work Eine neue Bestimmung der Moleküldimensionen (A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions) as dissertation at the University of Zurich and it is accepted at the end of July.

1906 - In the middle of January Einstein is awarded a doctorate by the University of Zurich and in April he is promoted to be a second-class technical expert at the Patent Office.

1907 - Einstein starts to think about the general theory of relativity and discovers the principle of equivalence of mass and energy for continuously accelerated systems. His application for the doctorate is rejected by the University of Bern as his doctorate paper is not sufficient.

1908 - Through handing in a new dissertation, Einstein is awarded the doctorate at the University of Bern and becomes a private college lecturer. At the end of the year he holds his first lecture.

So Einstein had already completed one successful dissertation and received his doctorate. He applies for a second doctorate at a second university and is rejected, but for technical reasons not related to his ability. He corrects those and is awarded the doctorate.

Same for Churchill. There’s no “eighth grade” in English education in the first place, and the chronology shows a different pattern.

Churchill did badly at Harrow, regularly being punished for poor work and lack of effort. His nature was independent and rebellious and he failed to achieve much academically, failing some of the same courses numerous times and refusing to study the classics (that is, Latin and Ancient Greek). Despite this, he showed great ability in other areas such as mathematics and history, in both of which he was placed at times top in his class. The view of Churchill as a failure at school is one which he himself propagated, probably due to his father’s intense dislike of the young Winston and his obvious readiness to label his son a disappointment. He did, however, become the school’s fencing champion.

In my experience, this kind of glurge always falsify the complexities of history by reducing the real world to moronic yes/no issues. The only thing that can be reduced that way is glurge.

[RealityChuck]

I think the Dr. Seuss rejection number is legit: “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street,” his first book, did have a large number of rejections before he sold it (after a chance meeting with a friend who worked for a publisher). But he was already a successful commercial artist at the time.

[samclem]

Churchill later gave a commencement speech at Oxford consisting of only seven words:“Never give up! Never, never give up!”

I can’t find anything that says he did this, but I can find newspaper columns from the late 1960’s in which Dr. Norman Vincent Peale talked about going to Churchill’s birthplace and being shown around by a woman guide who said she had been in the household since she was a young girl. She also told Peale that Churchill was invited to speak to the boys at Harrow later in his life. He gave a speech which was “Never, never, never give up.”

If figures that someone like Peale would be a perfect vector for such a story.

[Agonist]

My google search found a site which claims the source of the “never give up” myth is a 1941 speech at Harrow (as mentioned above). It includes the full text of the speech and is definitely not a single line.

Never Give In

It’s kind of a shame, because I own the urban legend version as a refrigerator magnet. Ah, well; ignorance fought.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

There’s another bit of glurge going around (I think Ann Landers once ran it) which cites the endless failures of an aspiring politician, who is revealed at the end to be Abraham Lincoln. It also overstates things quite a bit - unnecessarily, as Lincoln did have a lot of setbacks in his life.