Tony Williamson

Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, scholar, educator, and president emeritus of Morehouse College, said:

"It must be borne in mind that the tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn't calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. It is not a disaster to be unable to capture your ideal, but it is a disaster to have no ideal to capture. It is not a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for. Not failure, but low aim is sin."

I have now completed the series of articles explaining the highly successful planning method embodied in the acronym DOME - diagnosis, objectives, methods and evaluation. For a DOME plan to fix itself into your subconscious mind, it has to be written down on paper. If you do not write it out, you may miss the incredible power of the subconscious objectives that you constantly read and reread.

What I am going to share with you is a true story. You may find it difficult to believe, but it proves the power of the DOME at any age in life. It also demonstrates that failure is not final.

If anyone in the world was a failure, it was he. Failure dominated his life, misfortune was his twin brother. His father died when he was only five years old and he quit school at 16. He married at 18, became a father at 19 and the couple had a wonderful baby daughter, a child he loved with a passion. But at 20 his wife left him and took their baby daughter with her, devastating him. After he married at 18, he worked as a railroad conductor and failed at that. He joined the army and crashed out there, farmed some land and made a mess of that too, became a life insurance salesman and failed miserably at that as well. The only thing he could do was to cook, so he became a cook and dishwasher in a small caf?.

He worked long hard hours in that small, smelly, hot caf? As he worked, he grieved for his wife and baby daughter. Time after time he begged her to return to him. Time after time she refused. He went down on his knees, he cried, he implored her, but the lady was adamant she would never return.

So this young, broken-hearted father grew desperate. He loved his daughter with a passion and formulated a plan to get her back. He planned it carefully, mapped out every move. For a week this grief-stricken man hid in the bushes outside his wife's modest home, watching his daughter and planning his next move. He would kidnap her. He had worked out the plan to the detail, the timing, the logistics. The thought that he was about to commit a crime never entered his mind.

The day came when he was to execute this fail-safe plan. Driven by the desperate desire to have his daughter back with him, he positioned himself in the bushes and waited for her to come out and play. He waited, and waited, but that day, his daughter never came out to play. He even failed at committing a crime! At that time he felt himself the ultimate loser, destined to fail at every single thing in life, condemned to spend the rest of his life alone and abandoned.

The last straw

With time, however, his wife relented and came back to him and together they worked in the cafe, working and washing dishes until he retired at 65. On his first day of retirement, the mailman delivered a United States Government letter. When he opened it, it was his first Social Security cheque for US$105. When he looked at the cheque and judged in his mind that the government was now telling him he could no longer take care of himself, that did it. This cheque summed up for him his entire life of rejection, failure, defeat,demoralisation, wretchedness and serial disappointments. For 49 long years he had worked and it had now come down to a Social Security cheque of US$105. He reasoned, "If I cannot take care of myself and must now depend upon the government to take care of me, life is not worth living anymore". So he decided to take his own life.

Self-motivation

He took up a sheet of paper and a pencil, went outside of his house and sat under a tree. He was about to write his last will and testament. Unknowingly, however, he began to write a DOME plan. He started to write and, as he pencilled his thoughts, he wrote down what his life could have been (Diagnosis); what he should be, what he had planned for the rest of his life (Objectives). There was something he could do that he himself knew he could do better than anyone else knew he could. He could cook (Methods). In writing out these things, a light bulb went off in his head. "I'm not finished yet!" he said.

Birth of a franchise

He got up from under the tree, walked into town and went to the bank. He borrowed US$87 against his next Social Security cheque. With that US$87, he bought some boxes and chicken. He went home and fried the chicken with a special recipe which he had developed while working over the years in that little cafe. He started to sell the chicken, door to door, in his hometown of Corbin Kentucky. His name? Colonel Harlan Sanders, the originator of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Multimillionaire

As Col. Sanders finished speaking in California, the 88-year-old man walked slowly down the steps of the platform assisted by a silver cane. He had finished answering questions to 6,000 realtors at a convention. A voice rang out, "Colonel Sanders, how much money are you worth?"

"I don't know, son," he replied, "but if I want it, I can buy it."

At 65, a monumental failure. At 85, a multimillionaire, king of the vast KFC empire. Write your DOME plan, work hard and never give up.