Persisting #1207

It's the winter of nineteen seventy-four, and Britain is falling apart.

Coal miners are on strike.

Oil prices have exploded.

The government puts businesses on a three-day week to save electricity.

Television goes dark at ten thirty at night.

One minister even suggests people learn to shave in the dark.

A young man named Felix Dennis is trying to start a publishing company with no money at this time.

He says the shortage was nothing new to him.

His electricity had already been cut off weeks earlier, so had the gas.

He couldn't pay the bills.

He's living in an unheated flat behind a sweatshop in London.

To stay warm, he pulls broken furniture out of the trash and burns it in the fireplace.

His girlfriend has a normal job, and she tells him to quit and get one too, but he won't, so she leaves.

Years later, he wrote this, quote, "That was the secret ingredient.

I would not take no for an answer.

I would not give in.

I was going to be rich somehow, some way, and I would not retreat to the safety of a decent job until I was starved out of house and home." End quote.

He didn't pretend it was noble.

He called those the worst months of his life.

They were pure misery.

It was like bashing his head against a brick wall.

But looking back, he suspected it was his finest moment.

Thomas Edison is credit-credited with saying, "When you've exhausted all possibilities, remember this: you haven't." That broke young man built Dennis Publishing, which eventually had fifty magazines.

He was one of the richest self-made men in Britain.

Near the end of his life, he started planting trees, not a few, a forest, over a million saplings in the English countryside.

It's the winter of nineteen seventy-four, and Britain is falling apart.

Coal miners are on strike.

Oil prices have exploded.

The government puts businesses on a three-day week to save electricity.

Television goes dark at ten thirty at night.

One minister even suggests people learn to shave in the dark.

A young man named Felix Dennis is trying to start a publishing company with no money at this time.

He says the shortage was nothing new to him.

His electricity had already been cut off weeks earlier, so had the gas.

He couldn't pay the bills.

He's living in an unheated flat behind a sweatshop in London.

To stay warm, he pulls broken furniture out of the trash and burns it in the fireplace.

His girlfriend has a normal job, and she tells him to quit and get one too, but he won't, so she leaves.

Years later, he wrote this, quote, "That was the secret ingredient.

I would not take no for an answer.

I would not give in.

I was going to be rich somehow, some way, and I would not retreat to the safety of a decent job until I was starved out of house and home." End quote.

He didn't pretend it was noble.

He called those the worst months of his life.

They were pure misery.

It was like bashing his head against a brick wall.

But looking back, he suspected it was his finest moment.

Thomas Edison is credit-credited with saying, "When you've exhausted all possibilities, remember this: you haven't." That broke young man built Dennis Publishing, which eventually had fifty magazines.

He was one of the richest self-made men in Britain.

Near the end of his life, he started planting trees, not a few, a forest, over a million saplings in the English countryside.