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You Can’t Predict the Future, But You Can Create It
You Can’t Predict the Future,
But You Can Create It
Angelo Siciliano was a boy from a poor Italian family whose parents immigrated
to the U.S. from Italy. Skinny and shy, Siciliano was bullied by bigger
and stronger boys. One day he stood up to them and in return they gave him a bad beating. Siciliano vowed that this would never happen
again. He was determined to create his own future and become not just strong enough to defend himself and ward off their bullying, but to become impressively strong. This was the definite goal that Drucker said must be the starting point of all planning.
For months, Siciliano avoided everyone. Even friends wondered what had happened to him. In secret, he borrowed books on bodybuilding from
the library. Unable to afford the weights most of them recommended for building muscle, he made a close study of all bodybuilding methods. He
recognized that muscles were enlarged by working each muscle against increasingly greater resistance. He saw that such resistance could come from other sources besides the use of weights. Conducting his own experiments
and using his own body as a subject, he took action and put his ideas into practice without the use of the weights and the other equipment
which he could not afford.
Working his muscles daily and applying his methods, he gained the strength and muscles he sought. Finally, he was ready to meet his tormentors.
He actually sought them out. They wanted no part of him. Rather than fight the strong man the former weakling had become, they fled.
Angelo Siciliano, however, continued to develop his body. As many reached a goal after working a plan, he set a new goal. His success as a
bodybuilder led him to enter bodybuilding contests. At first, he did poorly.
But as he continued, and with the future he was creating constantly in mind, he got better and better. Finally came the day that he won a major
bodybuilding title: “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man.” Angelo Siciliano had created his own future in a big way, but he still wasn’t done.
Now Siciliano set a new goal. He had a vision of strong young men who had once been weak, all changed by his methods, which he called
“dynamic tension.” He put together a odybuilding course which he sold
through the mail. That course made Siciliano a multi-millionaire. Over the next fifty years, tens of thousands of his mail-order students benefited from it. So powerful was the course that he envisioned that it still sells today, more than thirty years after his death. If you are a male, you will probably recognize the name he adopted, for long ago Siciliano
changed his name to better reflect who and what he had become. The name the world came to know him by is “Charles Atlas.”
In every field, there are those like Charles Atlas that may have few resources to begin with. They create their own futures. They may not have
strength or wealth or education or anything that you think may be necessary for success in any given field of human endeavor. Yet they create billion-dollar corporations and even whole new industries. And they attain other goals as well.
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