Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2022. Facts it cites are as of 2022 or earlier: Anna Wintour ranked 28th on Forbes’s list of the world’s most powerful women, Airbnb valued at more than $75 billion, and Arianna Huffington having published more than 13 books.
When failure strikes, most people fall apart; they give up. As we often say, success and failure are outcomes that don’t depend entirely on us, but how we take the outcome is in our hands. So are the decisions we make after failure arrives in our lives. A failure doesn’t have to be the end of our career or of our dreams. You can even succeed after 15 failures.
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 in mind the research on statistics, randomness and luck, 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.
Here are the stories of some very successful people you know who tasted hardship and failure but kept trying anyway. And as the saying goes, some decisions make success inevitable.
10 people who succeeded after failing
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 the University of Southern California’s film school turned him down twice. Someone thought he didn’t have what it took to work in film.
He could have held a grudge, but once he had made it, Spielberg backed the very school that had rejected him, donating money and buildings. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1994 and became a trustee in 1996. Spielberg is without doubt a great example of a successful person who, in his day, had to deal with failure.
2. Henry Ford
In 1891, Henry Ford managed to talk to Thomas Edison about the new idea of the automobile. He wanted to be part of the change and build his own vehicles. He set up the Detroit Automobile Company in 1899 and, overwhelmed by debt, had to bring partners into the business to cope with what he owed. His first cars were poor quality and very expensive, so he couldn’t find a way to stay afloat and the company went bust.
See also: The 3 keys to business success
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 once again he had to ask for help by bringing in partners. In the end he got what he was after, 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 on Forbes’s list of the world’s 100 most powerful women. But her career didn’t look 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 she doubled the number of copies sold a couple of years later. Finally, after a few more spells at various 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, painful as it may seem at first, 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 free to let their ingenuity run wild.
4. Colonel Sanders
If there’s one entrepreneur we can hold up as the ultimate symbol of persistence, it’s surely Colonel Sanders, who strung together one failure after another before finding success at the age of 65.
He went from one career to the next, trying his luck at everything from farming to making acetylene lamps. He was fired from several salaried jobs for fighting, started various ventures and failed at all of them.
Yet his final business, Kentucky Fried Chicken (known today as KFC), is now one of the most successful fast-food businesses in the world. The franchise model, which was the key to KFC’s success, was born out of necessity after Sanders’s restaurant was forced to close. He travelled all over the United States with the secret recipe inherited from his grandmother and ended up building the KFC empire. This man’s message is clear: never stop fighting.
5. Evan Spiegel
The co-founder of Snapchat was one of the youngest billionaires in the world. Yet before he made it, when he was a student at Stanford University, Spiegel’s life hardly looked momentous.
His girlfriend had broken up with him, he had been thrown off campus, and the only user of his first company was his mother. A situation that could crush anyone.
He later said that 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.
6. Richard Branson
Branson had dyslexia, and the problem was that back then nobody really knew what dyslexia was, so people who had it were often labelled stupid. That led him to drop out of school.
His first business came in 1966, when Branson was 16: a magazine called Student. A dyslexic running a publication is something people would find hard to believe even today, but the project took off. 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 Branson’s favourite pieces of advice comes from: take on new challenges every day.
7. Arianna Huffington
Huffington’s book was rejected by 36 publishers. And when she ran for governor of California in 2003, she won just 0.55 percent of the vote.
Clearly Huffington learned from her failures. In a 2010 interview, she said that campaign fundraising had shown her “the power of the internet”.
The incredible success of The Huffington Post proves it. She has now published more than 13 books, and Forbes has named her one of the most influential women in media.
8. Walt Disney
In Walt Disney’s own words: “Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad […] at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.”
Before his death in 1966, Walt Disney laid the foundations of one of the most successful and iconic media corporations in the world. The Walt Disney Company is now a huge business made up of television networks, theme parks and a hugely successful film studio. Yet, as Disney himself admitted, his first commercial ventures were disastrous.
In 1920, Walt co-founded Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. Shortly afterwards, however, he left it for a salaried job at the Kansas City Film Ad Company. A second venture, “Newman Laugh-O-Grams”, was launched in 1922, only to end in complete bankruptcy. It wasn’t until 1923 that Walt found success with the Disney Brothers Studio, the company known today as Walt Disney.
9. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia
Airbnb is currently valued at more than $75 billion. But its co-founders would probably never have predicted that success back in 2008.
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.
But they refused to give up, and it paid off about a year later. Their business wasn’t well received at first, and once it did succeed, its business model stirred up controversy. Today nobody doubts that, after their early failures, these entrepreneurs have in some ways changed the way we travel and find places to stay, through the so-called “sharing economy”.
10. JK Rowling
And we end with the most famous author of our generation.
By the age of 28, she had become a depressed single mother forced to rely on state benefits. The original Harry Potter manuscript was turned down by twelve publishers, and the agent she eventually found warned her that she would never get rich as a writer. Despite these setbacks, Rowling persevered and is now one of the most successful women in the world.
Her Harry Potter novels, loved by millions of readers around the world, became the best-selling book series in history. After her first novel came out she quickly reached billionaire status, but life was never easy for her, at least not in terms of success, as her early years were marred by tragedy and money troubles.
Success at the first attempt
Unlike the people we’ve named, there are cases like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), David Karp (Tumblr) and Andrew Mason (Groupon), entrepreneurs whose first venture catapulted them to success. And many people may come to think that’s the norm, that an entrepreneur either succeeds or fails with their first company.
But the truth is that, as a rule, success doesn’t come at the first attempt. Those cases are the exceptions rather than the norm, because success usually comes from applying what the entrepreneur has already learned from earlier failures. The one thing all of them have in common is that the first difficulties didn’t knock them down, and their first failures were part of the adversity on the road to success.
See also: Personal development for entrepreneurs and how it can grow your business
Featured image: The original uploader was Gbleem at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
