Many of you from my generation loved listening to the songs of The Monkees. Even as I think about them today, I can visualize the introduction of their Saturday afternoon TV show, led by the words “here we come…walking down the street…”

The Monkees might have indeed been a breakthrough in comedy music sitcoms, preceding the Partridge Family by about 4 years. My favorite character was guitarist and vocalist Mike Nesmith. I thought he was a cool musical and comic genius. But years later, I realized that his real genius might have been inherited from his mom. She was a true visionary.

Bette Nesmith Graham was an American typist and commercial artist. As a typist, she struggled with how difficult it was to erase mistakes made by early electric typewriters. That challenge was the beginning of a life-altering direction for her family.
During her years as a typist, Bette used her talent painting holiday windows at a local bank to earn extra money. She realized that an artist never corrects by erasing, but always paints over the error. So she decided to use what artists use to correct her typing errors. She put some water-based paint in a bottle and took her watercolor brush to the office.

Graham secretly used her white correction paint for five years, making some improvements with help from her son Michael’s chemistry teacher. She eventually began marketing her invention as “Mistake Out” in 1956. The name was later changed to Liquid Paper when she began her own company.

Liquid Paper started the 1960s operating at a small loss, with Nesmith’s home doubling as company headquarters. As the product became an indispensable tool of the secretarial trade, Nesmith relocated production and shipping from her kitchen to a 10 X 26-foot metal structure in her backyard, where packaging, shipping, and production were centered.

Eventually, she sold Liquid Paper to the Gillette Corporation for $47.5 million in 1979. In today’s dollars, that would be approximately $165 million! Sure, I thought Mike Nesmith was cool. But I now realize that his mom is even $165 million cooler! Her tenacity demonstrates how to address challenges, not by trying to cope, adjust, or hide from them, but by seeking out a solution to them.

Stop trying to erase the challenges that your podiatry practice frequently encounters. Through our various podiatry specific solutions, NEMO Health has the ability to “repaint” your practice for you.

For more information, please contact me at John@nemohealth.com