One day Thomas came home from school and gave a paper to his mother. He said to her, 'Mom, my teacher gave this paper to me and told me only you are to read it. What does it say?'

The woman's eyes welled with tears as she read the letter out loud to her child: 'Your son is a genius. This school is too small for him and doesn’t have good enough teachers to train him. Please teach him yourself.'

Many years after his mother had died, Thomas was going through a closet and found that letter. He opened it. The message written on the letter was, 'Your son is addled*. We cannot let him attend our school anymore. He is expelled.'

By the time Thomas Alva Edison was reading that letter, he had already become one of the greatest inventors of the century.

*mentally deficient