Jim Stovall
American entrepreneur (1959 - )
- || At The Bottom
1988 -- Jim Stovall had withdrawn completely from the rest of the world. Day after day, he sat in the smallest room in his house, ignoring his wife and refusing to speak with anyone. A former national champion and Olympic-caliber weightlifter, Stovall had married and settled into a comfortable life as an investment broker in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The only glitch in his life was that he was slowly losing his eyesight. Diagnosed with macular degeneration as a teenager, Stovall chose to ignore the progress of the disease as best he could, even when he could no longer read for himself. In fact, he met his future wife, Crystal, when they were both in college at Oral Roberts University; Crystal volunteered as a reader for the visually impaired, and she was assigned to Stovall one day. As his career got underway, Crystal continued to help her husband with his work, going so far as to join him in the office each day as his assistant. But when the darkness came at last when Jim was 29, he was unable to cope. "I remember waking up one morning," Stovall explains, "and I stepped into the bathroom and turned on the bright light and looked in the mirror, and I couldn't see anything ... the bright light, the mirror, nothing. And I realized, that's it, I have now reached the bottom of this. And I actually went into this little 9 x 12 room at the back of my house. And I really fully intended never to walk out of that little room again."
- || At The Top
2007 -- Nearly two decades after losing his sight forever, Jim Stovall had become a popular motivational speaker, newspaper columnist and author as well as the founder of the Narrative Television Network (NTN), a service for blind people that adds plot narration to films and television programs. NTN reaches millions of blind and visually impaired people throughout the United States and eleven foreign countries. An Emmy award-winning service, NTN is carried by more than 1200 broadcast and cable affiliates and brings in revenues of more than $6 million a year. For Stovall, though, NTN was just one part of his success story. By 2007, Stovall was reaching more than 500,000 people annually as a motivational speaker at business meetings, conventions and sporting events; he'd shared the stage with people like Colin Powell, Barbara Bush, Paul Harvey and Christopher Reeve. Along the way, he'd been named an International Humanitarian of the Year, had been named one of the Ten Outstanding Young Americans by the Jaycees, had received a National Entrepreneur of the Year award from Ernst and Young, and had been the winner of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce National Blue Chip Enterprise Award. To top it all off, one of his novels, The Ultimate Gift, had just been turned into a motion picture starring James Garner and Abigail Breslin.
- || The Comeback
For Jim Stovall, the comeback began when he decided to walk to the mailbox. One morning, he told a reporter in 2007, "I just woke up and realized whatever it is out there that I'm afraid of, can't be a lot worse than spending the rest of your life in this little 9 x 12 foot room. And as soon as the fear of not trying gets to be bigger than the fear of failing, we move. And the first day I walked out of that room, I didn't get a Gold medal or an Emmy award, I walked 52 feet to the mailbox. And that was the day that changed my life." Before long, he joined a support group for visually impaired people. There, he met a woman named Kathy Harper who -- like Jim -- had recently lost her vision. Both Stovall and Harper shared their frustration with not being able to enjoy movies and television programs, even ones they had seen before. Neither knew the first thing about television or film production, but they soon realized that millions of other people could benefit from a service that provided narrative descriptions of what was going on between character dialogue. Although supposed experts told him his idea would never work, Stovall ignored their doubts and had launched NTN by 1989; the next year, he received an Emmy for NTN's technological contributions to television. The key for Stovall was to recognize that while his blindness had cut him off from the world that was familiar to him, it had opened up connections to other people who were facing the same challenges. By thinking beyond his own struggles and despair, and by overcoming his fear of the unknown, he was able to make a huge difference in the lives of millions of people.
