Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2013, and describes Oprah Winfrey as No. 1 on the Forbes celebrity list and host of a ratings-leading show as of 2013. Her daily talk show had already ended in 2011.
Success can come in many forms. You can succeed in your career, in your job or in business, just as you can succeed in your marriage, in sport or in a hobby. Whatever your definition of success in life, there’s only one thing all successful people have in common, one thing they never do: their resilience and hunger for success mean they never give up.
Many people who have succeeded in business or sport have failed. Some have failed many times, but they never gave up. Successful people are able to fall once or several times and keep trying.
Winston Churchill once wrote that “success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm”.
Many other people have described success in different ways. Perhaps one of the descriptions that struck me most was a line I once heard: “Successful people are the survivors on a road full of obstacles.” And the truth is that, with a few exceptions, nobody has had an easy road on the way to success.
As we’ve said on other occasions, success isn’t a straight line going upward. It’s more a path of progress, setbacks, falls and frustrations. If you want to succeed, you’ll have to prepare yourself for the hard knocks that, in all likelihood, your current idols also took.
We could give hundreds of examples of the hardships many of the most successful people have gone through, and although we’ve already covered most of them on different occasions, it all leads to the same place: only those who are willing to push through the difficulties, and who never let the blows bring them down, reach the finish line.
Some of the most influential people in the business world, such as Richard Branson and Steve Jobs, used to say that if you want to succeed, you have to accept that you’ll have the odd failure. Take responsibility for that failure, learn from it and start again from a stronger, wiser position.
Some well-known cases of big failures before reaching the top include:
- Walt Disney: One of the great business leaders in film studios, theme parks and consumer products, he went through the experience of being fired from his job for lack of creativity. The following year he decided to start his first business, an animated cartoon studio called Laugh-O-Gram, and it went bankrupt. By that point most people would have given up, but he went on to create The Walt Disney Company, a company I think we all know perfectly well.
- Oprah Winfrey: This woman, No. 1 on the Forbes celebrity list and known in the United States as the queen of entertainment, with her ratings-leading show, as well as being a host, media owner, actress, producer and more, suffered serious setbacks throughout her career. She was fired as a journalist because she was “unfit for television”, a message that could be read either as racist or as meaning she didn’t fit the standard physical mold of TV beauty. Since she had several more problems with the networks, she avoided them by creating her own network and her own show, not without difficulties.
We could go on with one of the most persistent businessmen, Henry Ford, or a certain Michael Jordan, who was turned down at several tryouts for not having what it takes for basketball, or J.K. Rowling, who was rejected by several publishers because they considered children’s books weren’t a profitable business, and on top of that her book was too long for a child.
In the end, in business and in your career, just as in sport, as long as the final whistle hasn’t blown, there’s still a chance to win. The secret to success lies in never giving up. It’s obvious why that’s the one thing all successful people have in common.
Further reading
Featured image: unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
