"They Said I Couldn't"

——Six stories of people who wouldn't give up（2）

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.