Rejection Breeds Success

Learn to Love the Haters

While in college at the University of Alabama I decided to get tested for ADHD. I couldn’t ever focus and it had been that way my entire life. I had never been on prescribed medicine but I really felt this was a serious problem for me. My time left with health insurance was coming to an end and so I decided to see a psychiatrist while I still could.

While at the psychiatrist’s I was put through a series of tests on a computer with an assistant for several hours. A week later I was called in for my “evaluation.” The psychiatrist had never met me personally, the only thing she knew about me were my test scores.

Not only did she determine I did not have ADHD, but also she determined the following about me:

• I had delusions of grandeur
• I foolishly expected to be abnormally successful and this belief led to relationship problems
• I should be prescribed anxiety medicine for acute bipolar disorder

Anyone who knows me would agree that this analysis could not be further from the truth, nevertheless it devastated me. Seeking help, I had just spent around $1,000 as a broke college student for someone who had never met me to tell me I would amount to little and that I had no problem at all focusing.

I have kept this written analysis ever since that day and I read it occasionally for motivation. A year after the evaluation I graduated early from the University of Alabama with honors as a multiple business owner. Shortly thereafter I won a statewide award for being the entrepreneur of the year. Now, A couple of years after that I own two million dollar businesses. I can honestly say I owe much of my success to a psychiatrist with very poor fortune telling skills. Do I have ADHD? Who knows. What I do know is that people who doubt me are the biggest reasons for my success.