Ms. Susan Boyle: An Inspiring Story

by: Amy twain

By the time you read this, you probably heard of the inspiring life story of Susan Boyle. A 47-year old, unemployed, never been married (and never been kissed) woman from Scotland who elicited lots of praises and compliments not just from the three judges, but also from millions of people across the universe, thanks to Youtube.

Her inspiring story spread rapidly like wildfire and inspires others (especially underdogs and dark horses like her) to reach for your dreams no matter what. The Britain’s Got Talent contestant (by far the most popular these days), delivered a strong performance backed up with an even appropriate and inspirational song, “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables. I like watching that show, in the sense that Britain’s Got Talent is indeed about talent. It’s about talent through and through, despite your looks, and your age. And what I even like most about the inspiring story of Ms. Susan Boyle is that it’s as if she’s the epitome of dreaming and believing in your dreams—and not putting an age limit to your dreams and goals.

What makes this inspiring story so appealing to the masses, is the fact that we have a not-so-young dreamer dreaming to be a professional singer (wants to be as successful as Elaine Page at that!), when generally, dreaming is associated for the young and their promising future. But here, we have Susan Boyle to change the face of dreaming big and giving us her inspiring story.

Truly, she’s not just a living example, but also a living inspiration as well! I know of other singing competitions that imposed age limits on their contestants. It’s good that Britain’s Got Talent never limits their contestants for a certain age bracket only. Why this allure about second chances and underdogs and dark horses? And why not—it just goes to show that all of us, at some moments in our lives, can relate to being underdogs, since we experienced what it feels like being an underdog ourselves.

We want to inspired and strengthened after failure, rejection, and frustration. An inspiring story like Susan Boyle’s is just one strong validation and we felt justified that we can be like her. She’s also a real person (and not just any fictitious character) and she’s like one of us, living an ordinary life but who wants to have a better life.

So, how who can resist this inspiring story? As we live our day to day struggle in our lives, we all need some bits of inspiration to make us smile, enlightened, hopeful and optimistic for our future. And we don’t need pretty faces, toned muscles, almost-perfect hair that light up our TV screens to make us inspired.

On the contrary, it’s those flawed, ordinary-looking individuals which we can relate to that make us more humane and we can say, “If she can do it, I can too.” And I love that smiling aura of Ms. Boyle devoid of any arrogance or self-pity (unemployed, but still looking) when asked what she’s going to do onstage.

She said, “I’m gonna wow the audience”. And boy, she did more than just that—she even received a standing ovation not just from the crowd, but also from the two judges. Everybody’s got an inspiring story---what’s yours?