Perseverance: Not Giving Up on a Dream - Mrs. Susie Garber

[Music] okay so tonight is about your dreams realizing your dreams and not giving up on them there's a famous quote by Helen Keller she said we could do anything we want as long as we stick it out long enough so let's think big let your imagination go and think of those dreams that you have that you really really want to achieve perseverance means sticking to something hanging on and not giving up um so tonight God willing I'll share some tools of perseverance that have helped me and I hope that these will then help you with your own Journey with your your own personal dreams so um right now pick a dream something that you really really want to do um it could be a spiritual dream it could be a talent you want to develop it could be a skill you wish you could have um it could be something you really want to do and think about what it is and then we're going to go through some tools that could help you to achieve it so everybody's got their dream yeah okay um so one tool is positive thinking and under that is the category of visualization and what that means is like actually using your imagination to picture yourself um doing this thing that you want to do and um there's a famous there was a famous psychiatrist who lived during the Holocaust named Victor Frankle you may have heard of him he wrote a book called Man's Search for meaning which is an amazing book and he he speaks about how um during the darkest time when he was in alwoods he would visualize he kept visualizing reuniting with his wife and and every time he just kept thinking about it picturing it and then at the end of the war he actually did get back together with his wife um there's a famous Rabbi called the altar of kelm Rabbi Simka z z and he said all great men and holy ancestors throughout the generations reached their High spiritual level through imagination which is very interesting so so just for a minute you you've got your dream idea um if you don't mind you don't have to do this you don't want to but you could close your eyes for a moment and imagine yourself achieving your dream try to visualize it in your mind step by step and in as much detail as you can okay so this is one one tool that you can use to help you to achieve your dream also verbalizing saying to yourself or you could say it out loud if you want um with hashem's help help this is going to happen whatever it is um Hashem isem is helping me to get this job Hashem is helping me to do well in this interview Shem is helping me to do well on to write this poem to do whatever it is that you want to do um and this will reinforce your amuna when you when you um visualize and you verbalize um we all know that Hashem can give us anything um of course we have to do our hisa our effort and there's a line into hel that says um open your mouth and I will fill it and the idea is that Hashem has these storehouses of gifts that he wants to shower us with but we have to we have to ask for them ask for what we want and not settle for a situation if we want it to be better um there's an ex there's a story about um a woman who was expecting a baby and she was told by the doctor that the baby was going to be disabled so she was praying and trying trying to you know gear herself up and and she went to a rabbi and asked for braa that she'd be able to deal with the situation and he said that you this is wrong you have to pray for a healthy baby and visualize a healthy baby so she did that for I guess the last few months of her pregnancy and she in fact did have a healthy baby so um so there there is something about visualizing and and knowing what to pray for um Sarah yose who was um the daughter-in-law ofaj y um she wrote a book called it's all in your mind and she teaches um a positive thinking class she lives in Israel um and she says that thoughts are really powerful you know thoughts can if you have negative thoughts and you start thinking of all the negative things it can affect what happens and the same on the other side when we have positive thoughts and think think of the positive outcomes that can affect what happens as well and it's a wonderful book I recommend it and it's called it's it's all in your mind is the name of the book and she has many many examples in that book of um people that visualized and things worked out and this I'll just share one story there was a woman who was um 28 and she was she really wanted to get married she still hadn't gotten married she lived in Israel but she wanted to marry a full-time learner and that's something that was a little bit hard at that point at that age for her to be able to do that and she took um rabbitson yose's positive thinking course and the rabbitson met with her and spoke to her and she it turned out that this girl had gone out with over a hundred people like 100 guys and the riton said okay now sit down and write exactly what you want what you're looking for so she wrote down a full-time learner and you know all this and then um and she said and stop focusing on what went wrong on all the problems from the past and just focus on what you want what you're looking for and so and visualize it so this girl did this over a period of time um you know she kept visualizing this full-time learner that she wanted to to marry and um eventually a few months later she came back to the rabbitson and she said I'm engaged she was engaged to a boy who was 24 who was a full-time learner and she got married so um and there's many many stories that she has like that that are just like amazing um okay now another tool and perseverance tool is dealing with failure and obstacles because um we have to understand that really sometimes the failures and the problems are we're going to be building blocks to help us reach our Dream um there's a saying from kazal that um a sadic fall seven times and that that feeling and that failure is part of his his growth as a stic so um so that's an important idea for us to think about and I'm going to share later many my experience with a lot of failures and how they helped me to succeed um there's a famous psychologist named Masa linahan I don't know if you've heard of her she invented um therapy called DBT dialectical behavior therapy which actually she she developed it for herself and it helps many people and she has a quote um most successful people do not do not have fewer obstacles they just get up after falling down more often than unsuccessful people do so I love that quote um and I think if you think about successful people if you've read Memoirs or stories um you'll see that they went through many challenges most pres not every president but a lot of presidents if you read about them lost many elections before they actually became president I know there's stories about President Lincoln he didn't win right away um there's also if you think about um there's many authors if you read about authors like I'll tell you a few stories meline L Engel I don't know if youve if anybody's ever read her books um a wrinkle and time it's not famar okay so meline El Engel she has a a memoir that she wrote about her writing life and in the Memoir she talks about how she kept trying to get her first book published it was called meet the Austin and she sent it to so many Publishers and she kept getting rejections so she just at that time she was using a typewriter I don't know if anyone still remembers typewriters but she threw a cover over the typewriter she said that's it I'm not writing anymore and she started pacing around her house and then she started thinking of a piece about rejection so she took the cover off her typewriter and started writing and then she just continued writing and eventually she started sending out her books and meet the Austin got published and then of course she wrote books that Wrinkle in Time which got a Newberry award so um and of course we all know Dr Seuss right everybody knows so I don't know if you know about him so he had um his first book was called mulbery Street down malberry street you know that anyway so he sent that out to about 27 Publishers I think and it was rejected so after 27 rejections he threw it in the garbage now here's where good Wives come in cuz his wife was the one that took it out of the garbage and sent it to another publisher and it got published and the rest is history so sometimes you need um a good spouse or friend to help you uh get over the failure um okay so of course we know this idea from Judaism because we have the idea of Chua that if we make a mistake or we fall we can always come back to Hashem and and we have the beautiful we have rashash we can start all over again every year which is an amazing gift um so I'm actually going to share my story my own personal story of a dream and how with hashem's help I did my hos my effort and perseverance of some of these tools I'm talking about and was able to reach my goal um now I know that not everybody wants to be a writer or aspires to write a book though I'm sure there's a lot of us out there um I always used to think everybody was writing a book but I found out that wasn't true um you don't have to but anybody here like to write chance okay yay see there's a few of us out there um okay well so even if you're not particularly interested in writing I hope that the lessons that I learned will help you with your own dream because um and if your dream is writing maybe some of the specifics can help you too so my own dream since I was a little girl was to be a published author I wanted to have a book written by me um um I remember like I always loved reading and I remember going to the library getting those books and looking at who the writers were and thinking like who are these people I want to do that too you know I just remember that feeling um and I was always making up stories I I grew up in Pennsylvania like in a suburb of Philadelphia whatever so I remember going outside my house and bouncing a bow and making up stories I'm sure a lot of people have done that um and then I do remember my father gave me um a notebook a special gray notebook to write stories and poems and I don't know if you remember this I remember the first poem I wrote does anybody here remember the first time they wrote a poem or story yeah so I remember I got this assignment to use spelling words and I still remember the poem it was I have a little Echo and when I say a word my echo can be followed and always can be heard and it was so exciting I was a fourth grader and I was able to rhyme it was like this big deal to me and um I guess just for me WR writing's always been this like great outlet and gift which I always love to share with other people because I think it's such a special blessing um anyway it was a very very very long journey to get my first book published and it was a very very long journey to get my first novel published actually it was a very long journey to get all these books published um so it wasn't like it just happened for me um when I first started writing was before there were like emails I guess and I used to send books away in a brown envelope you'd send it with postage for return Postage and I would get the book back with a rejection letter and the rejection letter would say thank you so much but we can't unfortunately you know you get to that unfortunately part you don't want to read the rest we can't use it so I actually have I still have this big folder full of all these rejection letters I'm not sure why I saved them but I still have it um and I have I used to have this cartoon on the wall of it looks like this you see there's snoy with his ears up in the air he's in rejection slip shock so we always have this joke in my house that um when I get a rejection that my ears are up my husband always says your ears are up and um yeah just recently I got an email rejection so my ears were up actually writing or really I guess any dream that you want to do it requires rewriting it's not like you just send it away and it's finished you have to keep working on it and fixing it up um and I always say that a right but really anybody who has a dream you have to think of yourself like the little end in the cut does everybody know that story it's one of my favorites so in that story you have all these toys that are trying to get over the other side of the mountain and their train broke down and they're waiting and trying to get a ride with somebody and a first couple trains come by they're not interested in helping another a train comes by this rickety old train and says I'm sorry but I cannot I cannot I cannot and it rumbles away and then this cute little blue engine comes by and she said I've never been to the other side of the mountain but she sees that they really need help so she says I think I can I think I can does that sound familiar and that that just saying that I think I can and then she actually takes them over the mountain and I think that's such a powerful lesson for all of us that we have to say to ourselves whatever our dream is I think I can I think I can do it and just keep thinking yourself like you're the little blue engine um you have to push away negative thoughts and rebon yose has this beautiful I love this she talks about how when you start getting a negative thought immediately say to yourself This thought is null and void it's not my thought and then you have to replace it with a positive thought because you can't just leave a vacuum so I find that's very helpful because of course we sometimes negative thoughts pop in that's part of being human but we try to push them away and try to keep positive so um I'll just share the story of my first book first it's um it's called well here it is memorable characters magnificent stories it was published by Scholastic but I'll tell you what happens with this book so first of all I had written this kind of big fat book about um teaching writing with like samples of kids writing and all different writing lessons and I sent it away to this um like very prestigious um kind of like academic publisher I won't say who they were and they sent eventually they sent back three evaluations of the book so the first two were like these two letters they were very nice very complimentary and the third letter said um Dear Mrs Garber you should stop wasting trees that was the first sentence wasting trees and your writing is not as good as my graduate students good I actually that's actually what the person wrote in the letter then the Publisher's letter after that said well because of the third evaluation we're sorry we can't consider your book okay so my ears were definitely up after that now I guess I could have given up but I was really determined so I said okay and I sent it to um Scholastic now the coolest thing was that I got a call from the editor at Scholastic her name was Wendy and I still remember she called me and she said I'd love for you to come to our office and discuss your book so I all excited I was like this was like the greatest thing and at that time I was pregnant with my youngest daughter who's now 16 but anyway so I was out to here and I was so excited I went to Manhattan and I and I went to meet with this editor you know and she was it was very interesting because when we met she said um I used to be the editor at instructor magazine that's like a a magazine for teachers and I remember that you wrote an article about about um about how to um how to teach kids kids to create characters and I like that article now that article of course was rejected but that's how I just s like wow you know rejection could even help you so she said so now there's one chapter in this book she pointed to that big fat book I had sent in about characters so I'd like you to write a whole book about creating characters and I was like oh my goodness I have to rewrite the whole book I didn't say that I said oh yes of course and um that school year I was working as a a writing Mentor in basak Queens which I still do and so in every classroom that I went into I did character lessons and the book really it's what's special about this book is that all these pictures in the book are kids from Bak of Queen and when the editor would call me up and she'd say now how do you pronounce this name like sprinty and RI do you sure you want to keep those names Rifka said yes yes we want to keep those names and then she would say well could we put some references here like she would try to put in references to movies and I'd said no please let's not put that that in and she wanted to put some pictures of boys I said well we don't have any boys in the school so she was really very respectful and very sweet and it and it was just like so special you know and then here it was my first book so that was very exciting and I I had a feeling like I wanted to send it to that person that had talked about wasting trees but I had gotten rid of that letter so that was the end of that um okay so um let me just go on and tell you the story of my first novel which is um Denver dreams and that story also was built on a lot of rejection so here we go um what I just wanted to mention that I had to do a lot a lot of work to to get that novel finished and done but I know that the real reason I got a the Merit to get it published was that I did a lot of daving and I also decided since I'm working with words that I should work on shashan which is being careful with what you say you know careful that you don't gossip and say bad things about people and there's and so we actually in my house we learn every shabas we learn a safer um safer and we in the text and I feel like that really helped me have a merit to get published so um the story of my novel was that I had a very close friend um when I went to St college and she grew up from a very different background than me I I didn't grow up observant at all and um she grew up in a a religious home and I was she was just such an amazing person she um was a good listener she was a good friend and she was very non-judgmental kind of person so you'll notice that in the character in my book Denver dreams is based on her her name is haa and she's a lot like my friends um anyway we stayed close friends after college and she used to come to our house every Rashana but unfortunately she passed away at a very young age and that was very difficult and I couldn't didn't write about it like usually like writing has always been this outlet for anything but I I remember I just couldn't write about it it was too hard and then after some time passed I I sat down one day I said you know what maybe it'll make me feel better I decided to write about our friendship so I wrote a 10 chapter Memoir of how we met and our friendship and um it ended up being about 90 Pages which is kind of short for a book and I showed it to my mother it's always nice to show your writing to your mother and my mother said oh it's beautiful you know liked it so I decided I would send it to a publisher at that time there was a publisher called tarum um I don't think they're arounds anymore and the editor at at that time was Miriam zaken she's now the editor at art school but she was the editor of Horizon's magazine it was like a magazine where women could send in poetry and stories and Memoirs and she she had published some of my articles so I figured okay she knows my writing I'll send it to her so she sent back a really nice rejection letter my ears were up but it was really nice she said the writing's beautiful but this book is too short and not marketable okay fine I tucked it away that was that anyway a short time later I remember my mother asking me whatever happened to that story you know that you wrote about your friends and something clicked I started thinking about that rejection letter because you can learn from rejection and about it being too short I said you know what I'll make it into a novel then I can make up stuff add it in it'll be longer you know that was fun so in order to do that I started reading some books on um you know fiction writing and these are two books that really help me so anyone that's interested in fixtion writing I recommend these what's your story helps you with plot it's wonderful it's actually written for teenagers but it was it's a very like gives you had a plot a story and it it's wonderful and the Art of compelling fiction so that author I felt like he was my teacher I I read that book so many times and and he says you should give your um main character a secret and reveal it slowly through the story so that was a great IDE so I did that I gave my main character Lily she had a secret and I gave haa the other character a secret so they both had secrets I'm not going to tell you what they are because hopefully you'll read the book um anyway and then I also wanted to keep that theme of friendship which I did um and then I needed like a a villain cuz you kind of have to have you know an antagonist so I thought of this I just pictured this like really mean girl I don't know what came into my head and I pictured her with long dark hair and these hurricane green eyes and I G I wanted to give her a name that sounded mean and I just thought of this name rehea clar so that was her and um she was she was in the story now sometimes when you have a dream whatever it is you need some guidance or encouragement from a good friend spouse you know somebody that can give you help without discouraging you which is a little tricky line and you have to kind of know yourself who that person is so I had this friend that I felt like you know I'm going to show it to her I knew she liked to write and I knew she was kind of like you know an encouraging kind of person so I gave her my story she was willing to read it and what she said to me was um you know it could just be me that I'm not really into teenage things um it got very interesting around chapter 13 and I'm like chapter 13 there is no editor that's going to read through your book till chapter 13 forget it if you want to get published they it'd have to start out at the first sentence the first paragraph so it was very painful but it was very helpful so I went back and I put a conflict right away in the beginning and um I have to thank her for that um there's actually a scene in the book um where the protagonist the main character whose name is Lily um she sent sends her manuscript she's a writer she sends her manuscript back like this manuscript out and it comes back to her and she's very upset and um haa Comforts her and that scene was actually something that really happened to me because my friend was in my house and I got back of a manuscript that I had really put my heart in some book I don't even remember which book it was and I remember I was just like crying I was so upset and I remember she said something to me I'll always remember she said your writing is good you'll see one day it will get published don't be discouraged and I always remember that and so like I said it's good to have a good friend that you know can encourage you um so when my book was done that's the first novel Denver dream it was up to its ninth rewrite so I actually had on my computer nine different versions of the book and it wasn't called Denver dreams it was called connecting because I felt like it was about all different connections um and then I gave to my daughter Rifka who happens to be an amazing editor I just had this blessing that my daughter is such a good editor so I always ask her for help and suggestions she's great um so anyway she helped me out a lot and then I sent it off to a publisher and I waited breathlessly for their reply you know I emailed it and a little while later I guess it was about a month I got an email back and it's I remember this it said we enjoyed your book it was a good read and that was the end of the email and I'm like okay so aren't you going to publish it like hello no anyway so then I sent it to another publisher and that publisher emailed back after like a day um we'll pass on this ouch so my ears were up a lot okay so then I mailed it to another publisher because like I said you just can't give up you have to persevere and this was like a big publisher and I thought okay this big publisher they're going to publish it and um actually it was very nice they sent back a whole like list of suggestions and you don't always get that so I was very um grateful they had a list of 10 suggestions one of the suggestions was take the story out of New York put it in a different setting and um so I remember thinking well I had gone on a vacation with my husband to Denver and it was beautiful so I put my book in Denver what's funny is later on I found out that there actually is a seminary in Denver I just made it all up and if people like oh yes of course blah blah blah Seminary I'm like okay um anyway so I did all their suggestions and I sent it back to them and then I waited and I waited I got an email back and they said it's better but it needs proof reading and it needs more work okay so then I had this other friend that was a copy editor I asked her to look at it she did she was very kind she looked at it okay then I said okay this is it it's ready I emailed it back and then I was I was waiting but I was like you know when you're kind of scared like for the I was scared to open up when they sent me back the email cuz cuz I was scared what they would say so when the email came back I asked my kids if they would open it and they said no I asked my husband he said no so I had to open it and there it was and it said you know it's much better but we still can't publish it and I was like my ears were sticking way up in the air and it's like oh my goodness and I remember thinking okay this is it forget it I was feeling really discouraged but then um I said okay I've got to get this book publish so um I don't remember now if I emailed them back or I called them and I asked is there another publisher you would recommend and they were very nice the editor there said yes why don't you try Jerusalem Publications they're a small publisher in Israel try them so um they gave I didn't have the information so they I got the information from the email and I emailed it to them and then a few days later I got anema email back I'd like to talk to you about your book would you prefer a phone call or an email so I figured okay they're going to probably give me more suggestions how to fix it a phone call is better than an email so a phone call and then you know how when something really amazing happens you just remember exactly where you were and what you were doing so I remember I live in Q Garden Hills so I remember I was driving to Amazing Savings and my youngest daughter Dina Leia was in the back seat and all of a sudden my phone rang so I pulled over to aside and I answered the phone and this lovely voice on the other end said hello this is a Viva Rapaport from Jerusalem Publications we love your book we'd like to publish it I was in total shock I said really she said yes so um that was very exciting yes soem that was my first novel it's fun when they like sent the cover and the back cover it was like so exciting anyway so this is a publisher I got to to meet her she lives in Gula so I I got to meet her and there she is and then this was really thrilling I don't know if they still had there was this bookstore in the in the old city right by the coel so my husband and I went in there and there was my book on the Shelf I said okay we got to take a picture so there I am holding my book so that was really like awesome um and what's interesting is um people asked me for a sequel and I I was trying to figure out how could write a sequel because in my book I take this Lily from being a a young girl going to Seminary to being a married lady with a daughter in so I'm like how am I going to write a sequel to this but then I said you know what I'll take the youngest daughter and have her go into Seminary but I had a little problem I'll tell you what the problem was the youngest daughter's name was aigo which is my second youngest daughter's name and when she heard that I was writing a sequel starring AIG she said I don't want to have my name in the book because you're going to give her problems and everyone's going to think it's me and I mean I can understand it was like not so comfortable so my daughter Rifka the one I told you as a good editor she said well you know Emma some people like they go by their middle name so we gave aigal a middle name we named her AIG tahila and so she's only called AIG on the first page and the rest of the book she's tahila so we got rid of that problem um okay and then um yeah the last book that I wrote is um I mean the most recent one was was um roadless it's called the roadless travel and it got published by that that company that can sent me all the suggestions but that's also a cool story because what happened was um I ran a women a Jewish women's writers conference two summers ago I decided I wanted to do that and I had all these I had um asked Rabbi cron to speak and um and another author I forgot her name she's like an author she writes a lot of um hisor iCal fiction calina well anyway she was there and so I I really needed to like have ladies coming to pay for the speakers and I wanted to have the Publishers so what happened was um I was taking the positive thinking class so I was visualizing and I said okay 60 women are going to show up at this class I just kept visualizing and then I I called the Publishers these different Publishers and I said I'm going to have a lot of people probably 60 women and then I told the women that were interested we're going to have seven Publishers and they I had almost 60 women signed up they didn't all come but I almost had 60 and all those Publishers came and I got to meet this publisher from feldheim and I asked him would you be interested in this It Was a Serial I had written for mishak teen pages and he said oh my daughter reads that maybe and then he said yes so that's how that got published which was amazing um and there's Rabbi clone speaking and it was very cool because he spoke about his own writing process how his mother used to help him with his essays when he was in sixth grade and he recommends that and he told all about his um his own writing and then that's how I felt after that okay so um I just want to review again some of those perseverance tools that we talked about and give you a chance to think about um about your dreams so we talked about talked about of course davening and and doing something spiritual that'll help us to give us a a merit it's always good to say ask K to partner with you whatever you do every day and so it's with your dream of course asking him to help you um visualizing we talked about visualizing remember how um um Victor Frankle how he he kept visualizing reuniting with his wife and then he did after the war visualizing is very thoughts are powerful visualizing is positive thinking is powerful we talked about pushing away negative thoughts and saying this thought is null and void and replacing it with a positive thought thought we talked about building on um failure and obstacles because I mean a lot of like here an instructor magazine had rejected my article that led to my book or you know like we talked about so many people that had failures and obstacles and that helped them to grow and and to get accomplished what they wanted to accomplish um we talked about verbalizing to yourself with hashem's help I'm going to get this job with hashem's help I'm going to get my with's help I'm going to make this beautiful meal whatever it is that you want to accomplish um and we talked about being like the little enzen that that could I think I can I think I can um okay so so think a minute about your your dream that we talked about in the beginning whatever your dream is and and practical ways that you can work on it and accomplish it and um and I'm visualizing that your dreams will come true and that you should email me and let me know because I know that it will so anyway I want to give everybody a br here that whatever your dreams are your dream that it should you should have it you should come through and um and I want to thank everybody for [Applause] coming