Francis O’Dea – You’ve probably never heard of Francis O’Dea but if you live in Canada, you’re probably very familiar with the coffee house company, “Second Cup”.

Francis grew up in Toronto, was sexually abused at age 13 and around that time starting drinking. Life quickly went downhill and before long he was homeless. He had to beg for change in order to survive. For 6 months he lived on the streets with no clue as to what he wanted to do or how to get out of his current situation. Happily, today Francis O’Dea is a multi-millionaire. As he says, “One year I was broke, the next year I was a millionaire.”

He changed his life by focusing on what he wanted. He got a job and slowly started to turn his life around.

4 years later he opened a little coffee shop and called it “Second Cup”. Second Cup is now one of the largest Coffee Shop chains in Canada.

• Wayne Gretzky – Wayne Gretzky has been quoted as saying, “It’s kind of ironic when I broke in at 17, I was told I was too small, too slow and I wouldn’t make the NHL.” He’s now recognized as one of the greatest hockey players ever.

• George Lucas – George Lucas spent four years shipping the script for Star Wars around to the various studios and racking up numerous rejections in the process. If he’d let his negative inner voice get to him he would never have ended up having the highest grossing film of all time.

• Einstein – was considered an “unteachable” fool by his early teachers.

• Michael Jordan – was cut from his high school basketball team. Michael Jordan quote, “I’ve failed over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.”

• Bob Parsons – founder and CEO of GoDaddy.com. If you read his blog posting you’ll see that he overcame a lot in pursuit of his dream. He definitely was not an overnight success and experienced a lot of failure on the way. But, he kept his vision in his mind at all times and says, “I spent very little time looking back or feeling sorry for myself.” Another awesome quote from the article is, “Quitting is easy. The easiest thing to do in the world is to quit and give up on your dreams (and quite frankly, that’s what all the non-risk takers want you to do).”

• Beethoven – Beethoven’s music teacher told him he was a hopeless composer.

• Colonel Sanders (creator of Kentucky Fried Chicken) – was told “No” by over a thousand restaurants for more than a year while he lived in his car trying to sell his chicken recipe.

Read more inspiring stories about people who refused to take “no” for the answer, then got focused, and then succeeded:

http://www.life-with-confidence.com/inspirational-stories.html