Keep Dreaming

I was reading a book by Phillip Delves Broughton about his experience at HBS when I saw a quote that changed my life. I bought a big cardboard and pasted it on my room door. It said ‘“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” -Theodore Roosevelt.

Recently, I came across a woman who probably had read this quote too; her name is Susan Boyle (I know am a bit 2000 and late but…). Boyle became popular when she auditioned for Britain’s Got Talent at the age of 47. Her looks and lack of charisma got the audience laughing as she came on stage saying she wanted to become the next Elaine Paige. 

Boyle who was diagnosed as having learning difficulties and was employed only once in her life as a trainee cook got the audience inspired by amazing performance. Her looks betrayed the inner beauty of music in her soul. One of BGT Judge’s Amanda Holden remarked that her performance was the "biggest wake-up call ever."

 

Within the week following her performance on Britain's Got Talent, Boyle had become a superstar. Although she came second in the competition, her first album I Dreamed a Dream became Amazon.com's best-selling album in pre-sales on 4 September 2009, three months before the scheduled release. In Britain, Boyle's album was recognized as the fastest selling UK debut album of all time selling 411,820 copies. 

In the U.S., the album sold 701,000 copies in its first week, the best opening week for a debut artist in over a decade. It topped the Billboard chart for six straight weeks and although it narrowly failed to become the best-selling album of 2009, with sales of 3,104,000 compared to 3,217,000 for Taylor Swift's Fearless, it was one of only two albums to sell over 3 million copies in the U.S. In Italy, it was the first album of the month in the Italian No. 1 Account by a non-Italian artist ever. In only a week, it sold more than 2 million copies worldwide, becoming the fastest selling global female debut album.

 

Boyle performed for Pope Benedict XVI on his tour of Britain in 2010. In May 2010, she was voted by Time magazine as the seventh most influential person in the world.  Boyle was invited to Japan for an annual songfest, and a musical about her life will be premiered at Theatre Royal Newcastle in March 2012. 

The reality is we live in a society that judges us by appearance, Boyle is a modern parable and rebuke to such tendencies. There is more to a person than the eyes can see.  She is a victory for talent, a pointer to the fact that we all have something to give and share with the world. We all have greatness in us. We are rough diamonds that need a little cleaning to shine. 

A story, a painting, a book, a design, a song, a job, is all it takes to change the course of our lives. Keep dreaming.