You might have guess from my last post on Dealing With Plateaus and the lack of posts thereafter that I’ve hit a Life Coaches Blog plateau myself

Dealing with a lack of inspiration, I started asking myself; what inspires me? What has consistently inspired me all my life?

And the answer to that is stories. Stories of real people overcoming real odds, because if they could do it, why not you?

So I’ve decided to turn this plateau into an opportunity to share the stories that have inspired me, and will hopefully inspire you (and me again!) in turn.

Today’s story I first read from the book Alpha Leadership: Tools for Business Leaders Who Want More from Life, by Ann Deering, Robert Dilts and Julian Russell.

“On November 1995, the violinist Itzhak Perlman performed at the Lincoln Center in New York City. He had polio as a child and walks with crutches. The audience waited patiently as he made his way slowly across the stage to his chair, sat down, put his crutches on the floor, removed the braces from his legs, settled himself in his characteristic pose, one foot tucked back, the other pushed forwards, bent down to pick up his violin, gripped it with his chin, and nodded to the conductor to indicate he was ready.

“It was a familiar ritual for Perlman fans: the crippled genius making light of his disability before his sublime music transcended everything. But this time was different.

“‘Just as he finished the first few bars,’ the Houston Chronicle music critic recalls, ‘one of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it snap – it went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what that sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do.’ It was obvious – he had to put down his violin, replace his braces, pick up the crutches, heave himself to his feet, make his laborious way offstage and either get another violin or restring his crippled instrument.

“He didn’t. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then signalled the conductor to begin again. The audience was spell-bound.

Everyone knows it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that. He played with such passion and such power and such purity…You could see him modulating, changing, and recomposing the piece in his head…At one point it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get…sounds from them they had never made before.

“When he finished there was an awed silence, and then the audience rose, as one.”

We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering – doing everything that we could to show him how much we appreciated what he’d done. He smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and then he said, not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone, ‘You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music he can still make with what he has left.’

Update: Thanks to the white space who passed me this link, it turns out this story might be an urban legend after all. While I still think it’s a valuable story, I wouldn’t want to mislead you make your own call!