Canada: At least there are no Scorpions

I used to have a theory: if you are beautiful, brilliant, dedicated and hard-working, you will never know stress; Andrea Pierce taught me otherwise. I learn the most from my graduates.

The best parts of a Dale Carnegie class are is the stories you hear. I’ve heard stories that made me laugh, made me cry, made me angry, left me almost speechless (technically, I’m never allowed to be actually speechless).  

Do you think you’ve struggled, been hard done by, or suffered unbearable loss? Spend one hour listening to 30 keeners from around the globe share their experiences. You will be ready to kiss the ground in Canada by the end of the night.

To this minute I can close my eyes and hear and see General Motors engineer Syed tell the story of how he graduated university in Pakistan with top honours and launched his own thriving business. This victory was particularly sweet, as his high school principal had once told him he would never amount to anything. Some years later, he told us, he was relishing the thought of going back to rub his success in his principal’s face: to prove to him how wrong he was.

Mistakenly, I thought this was the happy end of the story.

“Just when I thought my life could not get any better,” he continued, voice cracking, “thieves broke into my parent’s house, and they killed my mom.”

“I beg your pardon?” I blinked. I thought I misunderstood his words.

“Thieves broke into my parent’s house, and they murdered my mom. They slit her throat.”

You could have heard a pin drop in the room as the class absorbed this information. Syed cleared his throat and regained his composure.

“I could not stay in Pakistan,” he went on. “Every memory was just too painful. And so, I immigrated to Canada, and spent years getting over the pain.”

Then he did a surprising thing: he held up a large, framed, professional photo of himself with a gorgeous woman and two beautiful children.

“Time went by and I met an amazing woman, who agreed to marry me. Now, life is full of love and we are happy every day. So my advice to you is, don’t give up on a happy life. Terrible things may happen to you. Terrible things WILL happen to you. But you can’t lay down and die; you have to keep going, keep working, keep growing, and you will find happiness. If I could do this, anyone can.”

More recently, I got to hear a story which will not only stay with me forever, but has provided me with one of my very favourite new sayings to use when people start whining.

Andrea Pierce works at the Hilton Suites Hotel in Markham. She is so stunningly beautiful, I often wondered how she wound up in hospitality instead of modelling. Smart, competent, hard-working and ambitious, every time she stood to speak I wondered how one lucky person could be handed so many gifts and privileges; what could she possibly know of hardship?

Then, one night, she told us of her family’s escape from Kuwait during the first Iraq war.

“My father made arrangements to get us all out of Kuwait,” she described. “We piled into a mini-van and headed for Jordon, where friends waited for us.”

Unfortunately, somewhere in the middle of the desert, the family came across a checkpoint. They were ordered out of the van and into a makeshift prison camp. To this day, Andrea has no idea where they were when this occurred.

“For several days, we had no food and almost no water. The water we did get was disgusting. We had no idea why we were being held, or whether we would ever be allowed to leave. We might have died there; who would know?”

Suddenly one day, a van pulled up to the prison camp. Intense arguing and negotiating took place. No one knew what was going on. Then, one of the guards called out for Andrea’s family to report to the gate. Were they going somewhere worse – being sold as hostages? Who knew?

“It turned out, my dad’s business associate was waiting for us to arrive in Jordon. When we did not arrive as expected, he knew something had gone wrong so he just got into his vehicle and started travelling toward Kuwait, stopping along the way and asking if anyone had heard of us, until finally he found us in this camp. He negotiated our release, and drove us to Jordon.”

Andrea did not have time to tell the rest of the tale of how she ended up in Canada. But she certainly did give the whole class something to think about when she finished with this point:

“Canada! Yes we pay taxes, and put up with a lot of snow.

“But at least, there are no scorpions.”

**

One of secrets for building courage, Dale Carnegie wrote, is to “pause to reflect that others have have had to face great discouragements and great obstacles and have overcome them. And, what others have done, you can surely do.” 

And when your day can’t seem to get any worse, remember: in Canada, at least there are no scorpions.