Surely you can imagine the burdens of a particular woman... to give birth to a child afflicted at birth with what we now know as autism. Even after learning that several doctors agreed that she had to institutionalize the child, she said, "No way."
Disruptive and self-destructive, he couldn't even be hugged or kissed. Doctors and specialists repeatedly told her she had to institutionalize her son. She refused. His unruly behavior at school was so egregiously disruptive he wasn't merely suspended, he was thrown out of his school. Permanently. Then another school expelled him... and another.
His speech defect, and the flat feet which excluded him from athletic pursuits, and the mocking of the other kids, all added up to a ton of pain. That pain was expressed as disruptive behavior. He was eventually kicked out of seventeen schools. Can you imagine what it must have been like? How understandable to make the decision to give up on him? How much can a parent take? What hope for a productive future can such a child's parents expect? They felt as if they were running out of schools.
They finally found a place for him in a private Swiss school. It was neither inexpensive, nor simple to accomplish. The certainty of accomplishment is vastly improved by the persistence of fierce love, of dedication to a child.
At his 18th school he discovered a fascination with, and love of, art.
It calmed him considerably. His interest and curiosity grew.
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Back in the States, with a family of his own to feed, he struggled and struggled. One of the better answers he came up with was that, however rough things were in his life, he hadto spend at least a couple of hours per week trying to express his artistic side. In those minutes reserved just for his creative side, he wrote a screenplay that attracted interest. Broke as can be, he actually turned down a whopping $250,000 for the script, because the buyers wanted the script outright. He refused to let go of the script unless he could also direct the movie!! Wait, it gets better: He wanted to star in it, too!
When your electric bill is unpaid, your refrigerator and cupboards empty, a quarter of a million dollars is one whale of a pile of money. His desire to direct and star in his creation was so great that the short-term challenges of physical hunger, pressure from the electric company to pay his bill or face turnoff, not to mention his wife and family, were factors he decided he had to tolerate in order to make his dream come true.
Know for sure that you've got to have a dream if you're going to make a dream come true. Put a date on it, and it's not a dream anymore. It's now called a goal. At 20 million dollars per movie, the guy who refused to sell that script won his battle, developing fame as "Rocky."
