Be a Builder

One day Thomas Edison came home from school and gave a paper to his mother. He said to her, “Mom, my teacher gave this paper to me and told me only you are to read it. What does it say?” Her eyes welled with tears as she read the letter out loud to her child. 

“Your son is a genius. This school is too small for him, and doesn’t have good enough teachers to train him. Please teach him yourself.”  

His mother did just that until she fell ill and passed away. Many years after his mother died he became one of the greatest inventors of the century. One day he was going through some of her things and found the folded letter that his old teacher wrote his Mother that day. He opened it, and the letter said:

“Your son is mentally deficient. We cannot let him attend our school anymore. He is expelled.”

Edison became emotional reading it and then wrote in his diary, “Thomas A. Edison was a mentally deficient child whose mother turned him into the genius of the Century.”

Napoleon Hill, author of the “Law of Success,” attributes his mindset and much of his success to a single word of encouragement that he received at a young age from a man that he barely knew. That one statement of belief in him change his life forever. A positive word of encouragement can help change someone's entire life. As you go through life, you can either build people up or you can tear them down. You can be a builder, or a junk man. I challenge you to always build, because you never know when that one word of encouragement could change someone life forever.