"They Said I Couldn't"

Six stories of people who wouldn't give up.

Too Short, Can't Sing

The adolescent girl from Tennessee is standing on the stage of a drama summer camp in upstate New York. It's a beautiful day. But the girl doesn't feel beautiful. She's not the leggy, glamorous Hollywood type. In fact, she describes herself as dorky.

Since she was six years old, Reese Witherspoon has wanted to be a country singer. And Dolly Parton is her idol. But this flat-chested wisp of a girl is no Dolly Parton.

Nevertheless, all of this summer she's been acting, dancing and singing -- giving it her best.

Despite three years of lessons, at the end of camp her coaches tell her to forget about singing. They suggest she think about another career. If Reese did have talent, it was hiding under her skinny, mousy frame and her Coke-bottle glasses.

Still, she takes their words to heart. After all, why shouldn't she believe the professionals?

But back at home in Nashville, her mother, a pediatric nurse -- a funny, happy, upbeat person -- wouldn't let her mope. Her father, a physician, encouraged her to achieve in school. So she worked hard at everything and was accepted at Stanford University.

And at age 19, she got a part in a low-budget movie called Freeway. That led to a substantial role in the movie Pleasantville. But her big break came with Legally Blonde.

Well, she decided, if you can't sing and you aren't glamorous, "play to your strengths. If you're going to make it in this business, it's not going to be on sexy -- that's not who you are. Better focus on what you're good at. Celebrate yourself." And then came the offer that took her back to her Nashville roots -- playing the wife of tormented country star Johnny Cash. A singing role.

All of a sudden the old fears were back. She was so nervous on the set, a reporter wrote, she "kept a sick bucket" nearby and admitted she "would go backstage after a singing scene and shake." But she didn't give up on the movie or herself.

The humor and drive she learned at home overcame the self-doubt learned on that summer stage. She spent six months taking singing lessons again. She learned to play the Autoharp. And the hard work built up her confidence.

Last March, Reese Witherspoon walked up on another stage, the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, and accepted the Oscar as Best Actress for her heartbreaking, heartwarming singing role as June Carter Cash in Walk the Line.

Dumb Kids Can't Jump

"Too dumb. You'll never graduate from high school," his elementary school teacher told seven-year-old Adam Zimmerman. Sure enough, he "failed" and was held back a grade.

Being left behind by friends made him feel like "trash." But his teacher's cutting comment changed his life. It transformed a kid with dyslexia into a person driven to succeed.

"Just because one person says something, don't take their word," his mother told him. "Go out and prove them wrong. It's not about the disability; it's what you do about it."

Zimmerman did graduate from high school, and at 5'7" he excelled in two sports he was considered too small for: basketball and volleyball. He was MVP and All Conference in both.

That still wasn't enough to earn him a big-time college scholarship. So he went to a Division II school and worked on his game. And though a coach told him he'd never be a Division I basketball player, in his sophomore year he transferred to Marshall University in West Virginia, a Division I school. And he practiced and practiced. The following year he made the team as a walk-on player.

This May, the dumb kid who was too short graduated with a degree in sports management and marketing.

When he thinks back to that grade school teacher, he says, "I thank her for saying that. It's unbelievable how a person's words can stick in the back of your mind and push you to be more than what they say you can be."

"There's Gotta Be a Better Way"

Joy Mangano was 33 and divorced, had three kids under age 7, and was barely keeping up payments on her small two-bedroom home by working extra weekend hours as a waitress.

"There were times when I would lie in bed and think, I don't know how I'm going to pay that bill," Mangano says.

But she had a knack for seeing the obvious. She knew firsthand how hard it was to mop the floor. "I was tired of bending down, putting my hands in dirty water, wringing out a mop," Mangano says. "So, I said, 'There's gotta be a better way.' "

How about a "self-wringing" mop? She designed a distinctive tool you could twist in two directions at once, and still keep your hands clean and dry. She set out to sell it, first a few at flea markets.

Then Mangano met with the media. But would couch potatoes buy a mop? The experts on shopping TV were less than certain. They gave it a try, and it failed. Mangano was sure it would sell if they'd let her do the on-camera demonstration. "Brave little me. I said, 'Get me on that stage, and I will sell this mop because it's a great item.' "

So QVC took a chance on her. "I got onstage and the phones went crazy. We sold every mop in minutes."

Today she's president of Ingenious Designs, a multimillion-dollar company, and one of the stars of HSN, the Home Shopping Network. Talking about her household inventions is "as natural for me as it is for a parent to talk about their child," Mangano says.

Today one of her favorite products is Huggable Hangers. The thin, space-saving implements are the most successful gadget ever sold on HSN, with 100 million hanging out there in closets across the country. Of course, you couldn't possibly sell hangers on TV.

If You're Not Dead, You Can Get Better

Randy Kraus was paralyzed. His left side was useless. But his right hand was good enough to lift the barrel of a .38 to his temple.

Once, he'd been a police officer in Fresno, California, and owned a private-eye agency. Once, he'd been strong and able. Now, he felt he was nothing.

His trouble started with Parkinson's disease, but it didn't end there. In July 2002, the 60-year-old Kraus went into the hospital for an operation that implanted electrodes in his brain to control the shaking. But during the operation, he had a stroke. He was paralyzed. The cop, the tough guy, the man who loved golf, "could think, but couldn't move."

Transferred to a rehab hospital, Kraus wanted the therapists to give it to him straight. "You may never walk again," they told him. "Maybe you won't even be able to talk."

Once home, he found he couldn't lift a fork or take a drink by himself. Physical therapy was so painful and slow. What did he have to live for?

So now Kraus held the gun against his head. Feeling the cold metal on his skin, he began to consider not his pain, but the pain he would cause his wife, daughters and grandchildren. He didn't pull the trigger.

And his exercise physiologist, Andrew Garud, didn't pull any punches with him. You are where you are, he told him. The pace would be slow; the pain would be real. "But as long as you are alive, you have the ability to get better."

After three months of working with Garud, Kraus wanted to see if he could stand.

He could. Then he took three steps, sat down and cried like a baby.

One step, as they say, led to another. Next he managed a short walk along the edge of a boxing ring in the health club where they worked out. It was the hardest fight of Kraus's life.

People at the gym cheered him on. Garud kept saying he could do more. Now, Kraus can brush his teeth and shave himself, get around the house with a walker. Little triumphs only the paralyzed can fully understand.

Forget It -- Do Something Practical

The 16-year-old schoolgirl dreamed of a profession studying wildlife in Africa, but the school's career counselor was "horrified" at this impractical idea. She thought taking pictures of people's pets would "make a nice little career."

But Jane's mother said, "If you really want something, you work hard enough, you take advantage of opportunities, you never give up and you will find a way."

Never giving up meant traveling to the other side of the earth. It meant enduring physical hardship in the mountains of Tanzania. And it meant surviving a raid in which rebels captured people who worked with her and held them for ransom. All survived, and so did Jane Goodall's dream.

Her research documented the complex social behavior of chimpanzees -- animals that greet one another with a kiss or a hug, and make and use tools. Dr. Jane Goodall became known worldwide, and she changed the way we think about these remarkable creatures, all by doing the impractical.

Try It a Different Way

Bobby Moresco grew up in New York's Hell's Kitchen, a tough working-class neighborhood on Manhattan's West Side. But Hell's Kitchen lies right next door to Broadway, and the bright lights attracted Bobby from the time he was a teen. Being stagestruck was hardly what a street kid could admit to his buddies. Fearing their ridicule, he told no one, not even his girlfriend, when he started taking acting lessons at age 17. If you were a kid from the neighborhood, you became a cop, construction worker, longshoreman or criminal. Not an actor.

Moresco struggled to make that long walk a few blocks east. He studied acting, turned out for all the cattle calls -- and during the decade of the 1970s made a total of $2,000. "I wasn't a good actor, but I had a driving need to do something different with my life," he says.

He moved to Hollywood, where he drove a cab and worked as a bartender. "My father said, 'Stop this craziness and get a job; you have a wife and daughter.' " But Moresco kept working at his chosen craft.

Then in 1983 his younger brother Thomas was murdered in a mob-linked killing. Moresco moved back to his old neighborhood and started writing as a way to explore the pain and the patrimony of Hell's Kitchen. Half-Deserted Streets, based on his brother's killing, opened at a small Off-Broadway theater in 1988. A Hollywood producer saw it and asked him to work on a screenplay.

His reputation grew, and he got enough assignments to move back to Hollywood. By 2003, he was again out of work and out of cash when he got a call from Paul Haggis, a director who had befriended him. Haggis wanted help writing a film about the country after September 11. The two worked on the script, but every studio in town turned it down. They kept pitching it. Studio execs, however, thought no one wanted to see a stark, honest vision of race and fear and lives in collision in modern America.

Moresco believed so strongly in the script that he borrowed money, sold his house. He and Haggis kept pushing. At last the writers found an independent film producer who would take a chance, but the upfront money was so meager, Moresco deferred his salary.

Crash slipped into the theaters in May 2005, and quietly became both a smash hit and a critical success. It was nominated for six Academy Awards and won three -- Best Picture, Best Film Editing and Best Writing (Original Screenplay) by Paul Haggis and the kid from Hell's Kitchen.

At age 54, Bobby Moresco became an overnight success. "If you have something you want to do in life, don't think about the problems," he says, "think about the ways to get it done." "