Trey Pennington Was A Success Story and He Had Friends …
He had 4982 Friends on Facebook and 111,317 followers on Twitter.
I was one of them.
He also apparently had community of friends in the church where he worshiped in Greenville, SC.
That’s where he chose to kill himself 23 hours ago.
Here’s how Bridget Pilloud describes Trey …
He was a marketing genius, a dad, a sweet, intelligent person. He believed in the ability of people and had the unique skills to carefully relate marketing and social media in a real, easy-to-understand way.
Condolences and memories and expressions of grief spill over Facebook and Twitter including one that said …
“One of the worst things about social media is we can be surrounded by so many and still feel completely alone.”
You can be a massive business success and still be alone, because …
Helplessness carries stigma.
Countless friends of mine who have been massively successful in Internet Marketing, Authoring, Speaking or Business are struggling right now.
And they don’t want to admit it …
Because their business and future success depend on their current success.
Or so they think.
They feel as though if they are going through tough times, they are no longer successful and the longer it lasts, the more they think it will never get better.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Say you can’t enough times and you will believe it.
- Say it’s over and it will be.
- Say you are a failure and you fail.
Shout it from the mountain top …
We ALL struggle!
You are not alone!
Life has ups and downs no matter what level of success you have seen.
All around you are people with massive problems and the people who are well known and put what they know out there for the public to comment on, struggle just as often as the person who is not in the arena.
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
“Citizenship in a Republic,”
Thodore Roosevelt – Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
Let’s not be too quick to condemn.
Trey Pennington had depression and he killed himself.
As Bridget Pilloud says, “Depression is a whole-body disease. It’s a mental illness. It’s not something that people need to just get over. It’s not something that people can help.”
If you feel suicidal, but don’t feel as if you can reach out to those in your immediate network, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
Get together with people.
Trey Pennington’s last post on Twitter was …
Be attentive to the people around you. Many of them are hurting and you would never know.
As Bridget says, “None of us has to go through life alone, and none of us should die because we felt too alone to go on. Love social media or hate it, be the connections your friends and family and colleagues need—even if it doesn’t seem like they do.”
Let’s get together.
All the best,
Ken McArthur
Tobri.com
KenMcArthur.com
jvAlertLive.com
And more, more, more.
Click here to learn more about Ken McArthur
