Industry Icon Salvatore Fodera has a career that many your hairstylists dream of. From a starting point as an aspirational young hairstylist to now being the OMC World President, his career has spanned various parts of the industry and has a few worlds of advice to anyone who is looking to shift their path to ambition and success. Below he shares his wisdom…
If you were to chose just one part of your personality to develop that would be persistence.
“Ultimate persistence becomes a way of life, but that is not where it begins. To develop the mental strength, you must first want something. You have to WANT somethings much that it becomes your passion. You must fall in love with the idea. Yes, literally fall in love with the idea and magnetize yourself to every part of the idea. At that point, persistence will become a habit.”
“Persistence is a subject that I have studied all of my adult life and I can tell you one thing I know for certain: very few people ever, mentally or verbally, say to themselves… this is what I really want and I’m prepared to give my life for it, and therefore they never develop the persistence to achieve it. Persistence means that you are powered by desire and filled by the dream you hold. You start to use your imagination to help you build a bigger picture of your dream, to define and refine it until you get it just right in your mind.”
“Let me give you two examples: I used to compete in the OMC Hairworld competition because I wanted the Gold. I trained day and night, as soon as I finished the hard work in my salon, I went on working on my model. And the great day arrived – I was in Germany, I was expecting to be the World Champion… but somebody else won. But instead of giving it all up, I decided to work harder, better – and believe it or not: in Verona, Italy, the next time I got it! It was one of the most rewarding moments in my life: thanks to my persistence, I had reached my goal!“
“Another excellent example of persistence was demonstrated when in 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay became the first two people to climb Mt. Everest and return, after having tried and failed two previous years, and after many others before them had tried the ascent but eventually given up.”
“Persistence. Thanks to my persistence, my son Gianni and I have become both OMC World Champions.”