2017 National Mature Media Award WINNER

2017 National Mature Media Award WINNER
The Creative Landscape of Aging Wins a NMMA Award!

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Sunday, March 31, 2013

Big Success: Creating Solutions to Impossible Challenges

Life has its many challenges and the following three profiles show their strength of character, their conviction of purpose and their passion for success.

He was a young mountain climber caught in a severe blizzard. Having walked days in the frozen wilderness before he was rescued, frostbite took his legs. Doctors tried for months to save his limbs, but then they were amputated at the knee. Hugh was 17 and he would not relinquish his passion for climbing. So his new mission would be to dedicate himself to building a new world of prosthetics.
Hugh confesses to having been a D student before his accident and now is revered as a brilliant professor at MIT. At 48, he has spent the last 3 decades molding science and design to embrace bionics. He wants to rid the world of disability because, he says, its only limits are that of physical laws and imagination. And ironically Hugh talks about the aging benefits of having limb prosthetics; he can upgrade his limbs continuously and they will remain strong and, in fact, immortal unlike an elderly person who experiences the physiological difficulties of aging limbs.

THE pregnant woman was being treated for appendicitis when her doctor advised her to abort because her child would be born disabled. She refused. Now this child is 55 and is considered the most popular Italian and classical singer in the world and has sold over 70 million records. He is blind. He is Andrea Bocelli.
 
His eyesight was limited due to childhood glaucoma but it was the accidental soccer ball hit to his head that resulted in a brain hemorrhage and subsequent blindness at age 12. By then, he had already demonstrated his musical talent because at 14 he won his first song competition. Intellectually gifted, he studied at the University of Pisa and became a lawyer. However to earn extra money for voice lessons, he would sing at piano bars where he was noticed by Caterina Caselli who signed him to her record label. His incredible rise to musical fame is now history. Andrea’s success has contributed to the 2011 launch of The Andrea Bocelli Foundation which has two missions: to fund medical research and fight poverty.
 
AT 2 she was diagnosed with autism and at 4 she began to speak. School life was not easy. But Temple Grandin earned a degree in psychology from Franklin Pierce College, a master's degree in animal science from Arizona State University and then a PhD in animal science from the University of Illinois.

She considers her autism as an important tool in building her career. As a visual thinker, she sees her verbal communication as secondary and experiences extreme sensitivity to detail and changes in the environment. She believes that these unusual attributes contribute to her understanding of cattle and domesticated animals.
 
Temple is now a renowned  animal expert who has consulted with companies worldwide.. She is also an advocate for people with autism and encourages early intervention. An author, she has written  Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human.

 
 
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. 

~Victor Frankl (Concentration Camp Survivor, Neurologist, Psychiatrist)

 
 
Give me a place to stand and i will move the world.

~ Archimedes (Mathematician, Scientist)