In his book, Entrepreneurial Genius: The Power of Passion, Gene Landrum profiled the entrepreneur, Coco Chanel, the seamstress who had little formal education, but founded the giant corporation, known as Chanel. You may recognize this as the company that produced various products, Including, the perfume Chanel No. 5. In his biography of Coco Chanel, Dr. Landrum writes about her final years:
In 1968, when Coco was 85 years old, Time magazine estimated that the annual revenues of her fashion house and royalties from her perfume were about $160 million. But, in her final years, money was not a concern of Gabrielle Chanel. Arthritis began to invade her hands and encumber her dress-designing activities of pinning and fitting models. Most of the people with whom she had shared life’s joys and sorrows had passed on. Loneliness was becoming an increasingly pervasive torment, especially on holidays when her employees returned to their families and left her to the desperate solitude of the unloved. She told her grand-niece, Gabrielle Labrunie:
“All things told, you’re the one who got it right. You’ve got a husband, children. I’ve got nothing. I’m alone with my millions.”
On Sunday, January 10, 1971, in her eighty-eighth year, Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chanel called out to her maid, “I can’t breathe! Céline, open the window.” After Céline attended to her, Coco uttered her last words, “You see, this is how you die.”
The “take home” message is that fame and fortune can bring you many things, but it cannot bring you the things that feed the soul. In his post below, Dave Morgan looks back at the time when he was 38 and how his life unfolded after that, and then shares how he feels about his choices in life. Visit: Dave Morgan’s answer to I am 38 and I have not achieved much in life. Is it too late?
