The main philosophy told by this story is that whenever you fail you can have a fresh start because “failure” is not the falling down but the staying down. It is also the most striking sentence of Mary Pickford’s famous article. Her article has significantly encouraged countless people to go through the hard days. While, I am going to quote another sentence that hit my heart from the very deep: “what looks like the end of the road in our personal experience is only the turn in the road, the beginning of a new and more beautiful journey” (Watson, 1951, p. 157).
I always like to interpret the life as an entire set of all types of personal experience. For example, we have individual learning experience with different teachers and disciplines; we have particular traveling experience; we have diverse interpersonal relationship experience; we even have typical cooking experience. Some kinds of experience might be long journeys, some of them might be a really short one. However, it is the experience that makes up of our life. Hence, it is of importance to take care of each kind of experience to live a better life. I used to be bothered by a bad end of an experience. For example, yesterday our family decided to go to our favourite restaurant to have our favourite mushroom risotto. My husband and I were both very looking forward to it since we woke up for the restaurant had been closed for a month to redecorate. We barely ate in the morning for eating more at noon, we called the restaurant to make sure it would open on yesterday. I prepared a Lego toy for my 4-year-old son to play when waiting for the food. Unfortunately, the little boy woke up too early in the morning and fell asleep at 11 am. And when we finally reached the restaurant at 2:30 pm, we were informed that we just missed the chef so we would have to come here next time. This was an extremely frustrating dining experience and the silent atmosphere in the car was not making the situation better. Although I knew the anger ought not to be assigned to anyone, I was still in the very bad mood. I could not stop thinking and asking myself if there was no one to blame, how could I restart this bad dining experience and get rid of it. When I was stuck in my terrible thinking experience, my son suddenly shouted out “wow, MacDonald! Mommy, I want a hamburger!” Then I realized that I had not been there for a long time and really missed the taste of the hamburger we used to have. We had a memorable time at MacDonald, and we knew that MacDonald saved that day. My husband and I shared our feelings that the bad experience and mood might ruin the whole day if the little one did not accidentally see MacDonald. Especially after reading the story of Mary Pickford, I can greatly connect my thoughts and feelings with her words. We cannot change or restart our experience, but we can make a turn when we reach the dead end. And, I am not referring to some kind of ambitious life experience or shining pursuing dream experience. Like what I mentioned in the first of this paragraph, any tiny or trivial experience in our daily life counts. It is our decision to make a turn at the end of the experience to live a better and happier life, or just stay and let ourselves get stuck in there.
In addition, I believe the reason why Mary Pickford’s views and beliefs have affected countless people is that she had lived in those philosophies. Being the model of your words is the most convincible way to make other people trust you. John Maxwell (2013) greatly addresses the power of exemplary model by saying “the greatest motivational principle in the world is people do what people speak”. Mary Pickford, a woman of great beauty and talent, had known wealth, fame, honour, also known disappointment and bitter disillusion (Watson, 1951, p. 157). She was a real example of her words reflected from her experience. She could make people imagine that they could be just like her one day, which decisively motivated people to conquer the failure.
References
Maxwell, J. (2013, September 10). John Maxwell The 5 Levels of Leadership [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPwXeg8ThWI
Watson, L. E. (1951). Light from Many Lamps. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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