Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2015; Airbnb’s $25 billion valuation, Wintour’s place on Forbes’s list of the most powerful women, Huffington’s number of books and the timing of Spiegel’s Stanford days are as of that year.
It’s easy to feel that your failures are bigger and more permanent than other people’s. But the truth is that failure isn’t permanent and success isn’t linear. Even if you’ve failed at a project before, that says nothing about your talent or your potential.
We often hear about some people’s great successes, and while we keep very much in mind the research on statistics, randomness and chance, the truth is that successful people do have one thing in common: they can rack up failures without giving up on their ultimate goal. They can face adversity again and again and keep fighting.
Perhaps if we knew the difficulties they had when starting their projects, we would recognise that persistence is what led them to success, because some people would have thrown in the towel at the first obstacle they came across.
(See: The impact of luck on business)
Here are the stories of some very successful people you know who tasted hardship and failure but kept trying anyway. In the end, it’s the habit of persisting and not giving up that can make the difference.
1. Steven Spielberg
Jurassic Park, E.T., Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List… It’s safe to say Spielberg has had plenty of hit films. Yet he was turned down twice by the University of Southern California’s film school.
He could have held a grudge, but once he had made it, Spielberg supported the school by donating money and buildings. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1994 and became a trustee in 1996.
2. Henry Ford
In 1891, Henry Ford managed to talk to Thomas Edison about the new concept of the automobile. He wanted to be part of that change and build his own vehicles. He founded the Detroit Automobile Company in 1899 and, overwhelmed by debt, had to bring partners into the business to deal with what he owed. His first cars were poor quality and very expensive, so he couldn’t find a way to keep going, and the company went bust.
But Henry came back to business even stronger, and months later he was setting up a new car company called “Cadillac”. Once again he ran into too much debt and too few sales, and had to ask for help again by bringing in partners. In the end he got what he was looking for, a quality vehicle at a reasonable price, and changed the company’s name to Ford Motor Company.
3. Anna Wintour
The editor-in-chief of the American edition of Vogue ranks 28th among the world’s 100 most powerful women, according to Forbes magazine. But her career wasn’t so promising at first. After just nine months as a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, Wintour was fired for not understanding the American market.
She moved to Viva, where a couple of years later she had doubled the number of copies sold. Eventually, after spells at various other publications, Wintour became editor-in-chief of Vogue.
She has said that she thinks everyone should be fired once.
In other words, if you ever get fired, don’t worry: a change like that may seem painful at first, but it doesn’t have to hurt your career. Remember that great changes in the world, and great companies, have come about because at some point someone was fired from somewhere and was able to give free rein to their ingenuity.
4. Evan Spiegel
The co-founder of Snapchat is one of the youngest billionaires in the world. Yet barely five years ago, when he was a student at Stanford University, Spiegel’s life hardly looked momentous.
His girlfriend had broken up with him, he had been kicked off campus, and the only user of his first company was his mother.
As he later put it, he really had nothing going on.
His story shows that persistence can take you a long way, even when you feel that nothing is going right.
5. Richard Branson
Branson had dyslexia, and the problem was that back then nobody knew what dyslexia was. That led him to drop out of school.
His first business came in 1966, when Branson was 16: a magazine called Student. Picturing someone with dyslexia running a publication would be hard to believe even today, but the project got off the ground. Before he turned 20 he had quickly set up two more businesses in London and a recording studio. He fought his fears day after day. That’s where one of the pieces of advice Branson often gives comes from: take on new challenges every day.
(See: You’ll go to jail or become a millionaire. Branson did both)
6. Arianna Huffington
Huffington’s book was rejected by 36 publishers. And when she ran for governor of California in 2003, she got only 0.55 percent of the vote.
Huffington clearly learned from her failures. In a 2010 interview, she said that raising campaign funds had shown her “the power of the internet”.
The incredible success of The Huffington Post is proof of that. She has now published 13 books and has been named by Forbes as one of the most influential women in media.
7. Craig Newmark
Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, came close to wrecking his career while working at IBM in Detroit. He lost his patience with customers and, as he tells it, instantly gave the impression that he didn’t play well with others.
After moving to Charles Schwab and spending time managing direct reports, those same direct reports said he wasn’t a good manager. He decided to move into a customer service role.
He has said that at that point he took a big lesson to heart: the only way to learn and move forward was to face up to that kind of trauma.
His ability to recognise his weaknesses and learn from his mistakes is quite admirable, and it explains his later success.
8. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia
Airbnb is currently valued at $25 billion. But in 2008, its co-founders would probably never have predicted their future success.
Despite “launching” several times, the Airbnb site wasn’t getting any traction. Chesky and Gebbia got by while racking up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt.
Even so, they refused to give up, and it paid off roughly a year later. Their business wasn’t well received at first, and now that they’ve succeeded their business model generates controversy, but the truth is that they can already be described as entrepreneurs who, along with others who have used “the sharing economy”, will be part of the change in the way we travel.
Further reading
- 25 habits of successful people
- Entrepreneur succeeds after failing 15 times
- How to recover after a business failure
Featured image: JD Lasica, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
