Your Turning Points - when enough is enough...

John Nels Hatleberg.  Anyone who is into diamonds might know him. Of course, I have not heard of him before this. He is the world famous diamond design expert. An artist with stone and gem, a designer, a world leading authority in his field. He works with South African government, British Musuem, consults De Beers..in all things diamond!. John says by age ten, it was clear he did not enjoy his piano lessons. His true passion even then was stone. He was fascinated with stones and gem. He said that he had incredible parents who not only allowed him to quit his piano BUT also enrolled him in a gem-cutting course at age 10 ! It was an adult education program held in a basement of suburban Maryland recreation center. He studied gem-cutting with a bunch of retirees as his class mates. He learnt so much from the course and from his class mates who are more experienced than him. Age is no barrier. Their common love for gem easily overcame that. In college, he stopped his gem-cutting c...

Grant Hackett is one of the world's greatest long distance swimmers. According to Wikipedia... Grant George Hackett   OAM   (born 9 May 1980) is an Australian swimmer, most famous for winning the men's 1500 metres   freestyle   race at both the   2000 Summer Olympics   in Sydney and the   2004 Summer Olympics   in Athens. This achievement has led him to be regarded as one of the greatest distance swimmers in history. He also collected a gold medal in Sydney for swimming in the heats of the 4 × 200 m freestyle relay. He is well regarded for his versatility, and has held the long course world record in the 200 m, 800 m, and 1500 m freestyle. He has dominated the 1500 m event for a decade, being undefeated in the event in finals from 1996 until the   2007 World Aquatics Championships . In total, he has won 10 long-course world championship gold medals. Hackett was the captain of the Australian swimming team from the time the role was ...

   Neil Chetan Saligrama created his TURNING POINT in the most unlikeliest of all places.  From India, he came to Australia to do his Masters of Mechanical Engineering at RMIT University and had to work part time to pay his bills. All he could get was a part-time job doing telesales.  To most people, this kind of job is not to be taken too seriously. You do enough just to not get fired. How many would treat it like a long term career? Not that Neil thought this would be his career but it was (and still is) just in his nature to do anything with his utmost commitment. As the saying goes, "How you do anything is how you do everything." In a matter of a few months, he went from being a full-time student/part-time employee to being a full-time employee/part-time student. He was given the responsibility to train new employees and lead teams across different offices of the organisation. After a few years, he started his own marketing and customer relationsh...

This 12-minute short film tells the story of young Arnold in Austria. Since young, Arnold loved bodybuilding because it gave him self-confidence. But his father did not approve of his passion (as Austrians love skiing and soccer but not bodybuilding).  So h e had a different plan.  H e sent 18 year-old Arnold  to the Austrian Army to become a tank driver.  His father thought that by sending him to the army, he will quit his bodybuilding. Instead of quitting, he continued to train in the military base every night after a long day physically challenging training.  And when Arnold received an invitation to compete in a junior contest in Stuttgart, he had to make the most difficult decision in his life. To compete or not compete? If he was to compete, he must sneak out of the base as he could not get the authority to grant him leave. He sneaked out, took part in the contest and won first place. The authority punished him severely for sneaking out AWOL (abs...

Dorian Yates is a former professional bodybuilder, one of the  greatest the world has ever seen. He was   crowned  Mr Olympia     six times from 1992 to 1997.     His childhood was pretty 'idyllic' until his dad died of a fatal     heart  attack. From then on, his life turned upside down. Hung     around with the wrong people and got into trouble with the     law. When he was at the youth detention center age 16, he     discovered bodybuilding which he felt he could excel in and get    somewhere in life through it and, eventually, he did - Dorian      would then become Dorian The Shadow .      I saw him in the bodybuilding magazines back in the 1990s. And      then I have never heard of him since then until recently when      he  was interviewed by Brian Rose on London...

Reggie Nelson was poor boy in the UK, raised by a single mum after his dad died, excluded from school and got into trouble with the law... Without a father figure to guide him, and a mother who had to work long hours the future looked bleak for Reggie but he did not give up. Instead, he sought out those who are well off and asked him how they did it. On the advice he got, he went to university and went on to get a good job in finance. Read his story reported on Financial News London here... Or watch his interview here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxzLEITpcck Australia's renowned author, corporate keynote speaker and workshop facilitator Phil Schibeci has been helping organisations and individuals become the best version of themselves, both personally and professionally for well over two and a half decades.  In his second book entitled  Self-Made: Real Australian Business Stories ,  a joint-venture with seven other extraordinary entrepreneurs, he talks about one of the most life-changing decisions that he had ever made in his life that got him to where he is today.  Amazing story!  Written in complete candidness, Phil describes what was going on in his head on that fateful "forgettable Monday morning"... Below are excerpts of Phil's personal account taken straight from the book Self-Made . " It was a forgettable Monday morning at work, While reflecting on my life and feeling very unhappy and sorry for myself, I had a life-defining moment. Fifteen years ear...

In my opinion, Stallone's TURNING POINT came on 24 March 1975 in Ohio. It involved three individuals. They are Stallone himself (of course), Chuck Wepner and Muhammad Ali. To be more precise, I should say that Stallone went about to create his own TURNING POINT  (although he never expected it to come that night) after watching Chuck Wepner knocked down Muhammad Ali in the ring. “And then one night, I went out to see Muhammad Ali fight Chuck Wepner. And what I saw was pretty extraordinary. I saw a man called ‘The Bayonne Bleeder’ fight the greatest fighter who ever lived. And for one brief moment, this supposed stumblebum turned out to be magnificent. And he lasted and knocked the champ down. I thought if this isn’t a metaphor for life.” Stallone went home that night and started writing the script for what would later become Rocky, the movie that catapulted him into international fame and made him into one of the most influential Hollywood icon history. All in al...

I came across this set of slides created by Jaehoon Kim on Prezi.com entitled "Turning Points in Jobs' Life".  https://prezi.com/ussyaw2aqrap/turning-points-of-jobs/

In this BBC documentary,  How We Made Our Millions ,  Dragon Den  star Peter Jones asked Richard Reed (owner of the multi-million dollar company, Innocent Drinks) when he had decided to become an entrepreneur. Peter asked: When did you actually think to yourself, "you know what, i'm an entrepreneur"? Richard replied: I was 16 and i was working in a dog biscuit factory. My job paid two pounds an hour. And the task I was assigned was to get down on my hands and knees and pick up the dog biscuits off the factory floor that had fallen off the conveyor belt. So I went up to the foreman and said, "do you have a brush that I could borrow so that i could do this job better?" and he looked at me, dead in the eyes, and said " son, you're the brush ". That was the split second that I decided that there has got to be a better way than this. I left the dog biscuit factory that afternoon, went home and set up a little business called Two Men Went to ...

Life is not a bed of roses. Even if it is, it's a thorny one anyway.  In short, life is not smooth sailing. And that's what makes the journey of life so challenging.  During rough times, we tend to get lost. We tend to head towards any number of directions other than the one we know we should be headed towards. It is during such times that we need to be able to identify our turning point. And if we can't identify one, we owe it to ourselves to create one! In this blog, I have gathered stories from individuals from all walks of life and from all corners of the world about how they identified or created their respective turning points in the their lives and made their difficult journeys meaningful, triumphant, uplifting, inspiring and definitely worth sharing among us all. If you have important and inspiring stories regrading your turning points to share, feel free to write in. My email is khsoong@hotmail.com