I saw a billboard on a trip to London this week that said “nothing was ever achieved without perseverance.”

It reminded me of a story that I read once in the book called the Flipside by Adam J Jackson. It is a good read.

It highlights the need for perseverance in the face of adversity and about finding the hidden opportunities in life. It is based on a simple and inspiring idea, every problem or obstacle in our lives, however big or small, contains an equivalent or greater benefit or opportunity.

There is a story in the book that I wanted to share as I find it quite inspiring and is a good example how despite major adversity and disappointment you can achieve great things.

This story also highlights the need to persevere:

On the evening of September 22 1963, four young men set off in a car from Majadahonda to Madrid in Spain. The four were all good friends enjoying the night out, but it was to be a journey they would never forget.

Julio was one of the four men in the car that night. His dream was to become a professional football player and play for the team he had loved as a boy, Real Madrid.

He had nurtured his dream and pursued it from his earliest year and that dream was just beginning to be realized. He had immense talent and emerged as something of a prodigy.

Real Madrid had signed Julio as a goalkeeper and he was widely tipped to the future number one goalkeeper for the Spanish national team. Life couldn’t have been better for Julio; his star was on the rise, until the evening he stepped into the car with his friends. As fate would have it, his dream would end that night.

At around 2.00 a.m. the car that Julio and his friends were travelling in was involved in a serious accident. Julio awoke in Madrid’s Eloy Gonzalo Hospital to discover that he was semi-paralysed.

The doctors informed him that he would need to be confined to a bed for eighteen months in order to give his spinal injuries time to heal. Even then, the prognosis wasn’t good. They thought it would be unlikely that Julio would ever walk again.

But there was one thing that was not in doubt. His football career was over.

At night, during those eighteen months in hospital Julio would listen to the radio and write poems – sad, reflective, romantic verses that questioned man’s fate and the meaning of life.

On reading the poems that Julio had written, one of the young male nurses that was taking care of him, a man called Eladio Magdaleno, gave Julio a guitar and suggested he turned the poems into songs.

Singing began as a distraction for Julio, a way of forgetting happier times spent as an athlete. But, as time went on, the singing became more of a passion than a distraction. He scribbled numbers on the guitar to learn the basic chords. Every week, more and more would appear and within a short time he was creating melodies for his poems.

When the eighteen months had passed and Julio had recovered from his injuries, he decided to return to Murcia University to resume his studies.

Later, he travelled to England to improve his English, first in Ramsgate, Kent and then at Bell’s Language School in Cambridge. Occasionally, at weekends he would sing in the Airport Pub covering songs that were popular at that time from the likes of Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck and The Beatles

When Julio returned home to Spain, he looked for a singer to perform his songs. He took his first song to a recording studio in Madrid and asked if they could recommend a singer.

The manager, looking at Julio and listening to him perform the song, was confused. Why would a man like Julio need someone to sing his songs? Julio was a strikingly handsome man with jet-black hair; large brown eyes, a smooth, tanned complexion and a smile that could make most women go weak at the knees.

He also had a distinctive singing voice that was pitch-perfect. “Why don’t you just perform it yourself?” the manager asked. Julio answered “because I am not a singer!”

But, in the end, Julio took the manager’s advice and entered one of his songs in a Spanish music contest.

On 17 July 1968, just under 5 years after the accident that so nearly destroyed his life, he won first prize at the Fiesta de Benidorm with the song “La Vida Sigue Iqual” (Life goes on the same) and soon after, he was offered a contract with Columbia Records.

Chances are, you will have heard Julio singing. You may even own one of his albums. For the man who had lost his boyhood dreams in that tragic car accident went on to become the biggest selling recording artist in the history of Latin American music and a household name the world over.

The man who lost his dreams, found the flipside through a new, bigger dream than the one that was taken from him.

His name is Julio Iglesias and father of the pop star Enrique Iglesias

This week, why not take some time to consider if there is a goal or dream that you need to re-ignite?

Do you need to dream a new dream? Alternatively, if you are on the verge of quitting something, ask yourself if you need to persevere for a little while longer?

Quote for the week:

“Every problem has a gift for you in its hands” Richard Bach

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