10 Famous Failures Who Never Gave Up and Succeeded in Life

failure this is a word that most people dread while many of us want to succeed in life it's easy to fear that awful f-word and often it's easy to avoid taking action on a goal because you want to avoid that pain of failure that said the most successful people in the world understand that it takes time and effort to achieve your important goals in other words you often have to fail many times before finding success just ask any successful person and you'll probably hear a variety of stories about their missteps and blunders the big lesson here is that the difference between long-term success and failure is how to react to the obstacles in your life to illustrate this point this video will talk about 10 famous people who have achieved success but also experienced massive failure at one point in their lives so let's talk about the specific setbacks that these individuals experienced 1. thomas edison as a child edison was thought to be dumb and was told by his teachers that he would never be a success because his mind would often wander in class he is also famous for being someone who wasn't afraid to make lots of mistakes in order to succeed in fact when asked about his thousands of failures when trying to create the light bulb he said i have not failed i've just found ten thousand ways that won't work two elvis presley you don't need to be an elvis fan to acknowledge the impact he's had on popular music they don't dub somebody the king of a form of music without a great amount of success but for elvis success came long after a number of failures elvis failed his music classes he was a social misfit as a boy and he worked as a truck driver while trying to get his recording career off the ground after his first paying gig his manager told him you ain't going nowhere son you ought to go back to driving a truck but elvis persevered his first recordings went nowhere he tried to join a vocal quartet and was told that he couldn't sing but finally his music caught on and after all that failure he ended up becoming one of the most popular recording artists in history 3. michael jordan it's hard to imagine but jordan was once cut from his high school team but jordan persevered after experiencing this challenge he kept working at his basketball skills and kept improving he made the team at north carolina and became a star college player then he played for the chicago bulls where he helped his team win six nba titles and then in the middle of his career he took a few years off to try out his dream of becoming a professional baseball player he ultimately failed in this effort to get to the major leagues but was able to have some good games in the minor league michael jordan often attributes his success to the specific failures he's experienced in fact he once said i have missed more than 9 000 shots in my career i have lost almost 300 games on 26 occasions i have been entrusted to take the game-winning shot and i missed i have failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why i succeed 4.

harlan david sanders many of us experiencing two or three rejections can be disheartening imagine how it must have been for harlan david sanders whose fried chicken recipe was rejected over 1 000 times when sanders was 65 years old he found himself bankrupt after his restaurant business had failed he drove around in his car pleading with diner and restaurant owners to use his fried chicken recipe the deal was that for every piece of chicken sold they were to give him a nickel as a commission he was turned down 1009 times before a restaurant agreed to use his recipe which he called kentucky fried chicken today colonel sanders is an iconic figure who founded one of the most famous fast food chains in the world 5. stephen king stephen king is one of the most prolific and successful writers of all time he has written over 80 novels and almost every one of his new releases lands at the top of the best seller lists but king wasn't born with a natural talent as a writer he wrote stories as a teenager and a college student collecting a huge backlog of rejected stories he stored in a large crate king wrote his novel cary when he was working as a teacher in rural maine when he submitted carrie 30 times and was rejected 30 times before his 31st attempt he threw the manuscript out his wife rescued the novel from the wastebasket and asked him to try one more time and as they say the rest is history 6. fred astaire many people consider fred astaire to be the greatest male dancer of all time astaire didn't start out a success but he did start early at six years old when he began working in a vaudeville act by the time he was in his mid-teens he had some measure of success in vaudeville and began to work in broadway and musicals a stair wasn't an instant success there either but he slowly began to find a degree of success eventually in his mid-30s he tried to get into the burgeoning movie industry during his first screen test an rko executive noted that a stare can't sing can't act balding can dance a little despite this initial rejection astaire persevered and ended up becoming one of the top actors singers and dancers of his generation he acted in almost 50 movies and earned a variety of emmys grammys and an oscar by any measure this balding guy who couldn't act sing and could dance a little became a huge success in film and dance 7.

abraham lincoln if lincoln had quit when the going got tough the world might be a very different place as a young man lincoln entered military service in the black hawk war as a captain yeti left as a private with very little formal education lincoln taught himself and became a lawyer and then a congressman his real rise to national prominence could also be viewed as a failure in 1858 lincoln tried for a seat in the illinois senate this led to a series of hotly contested debates known as the lincoln douglas debates lincoln lost the senate election but really impressed a lot of the right people even with his loss so he kept at the politics thing two years later he ran for president and won thankfully he did not let lack of formal education a spotty career of failures or initial political failure rattle him instead he went on to become one of the greatest presidents of the united states eight jk rowling rowling is the perfect example that success can come to anyone at any time she always planned on being a writer but life interfered rowling battled depression over the untimely death of her mother her first marriage failed and she was left trying to provide for herself and her child while living on welfare going to school and writing a novel in her spare time rowling herself said she was the biggest failure i knew but credits a lot of her success to her failures at a harvard commencement speech rowling had this to say failure meant a stripping away of the inessential i stopped pretending to myself that i was anything other than what i was and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me had i really succeeded at anything else i might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where i truly belonged i was set free because my greatest fear had been realized and i was still alive and i still had a daughter whom i adored and i had an old typewriter and a big idea and so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which i rebuilt my life 9. albert einstein if asked to name a genius most people would say albert einstein yet even for einstein genius did not come easy he had speech difficulties as a child and was once even thought to be mentally handicapped as a teen he rebelled against his school's reliance on rote learning and failed he tried to test into zurich polytechnic but failed again einstein buckled down received the requisite training and applied to zurich polytechnic again and was eventually accepted a few years later he had a phd and was recognized as a leading theorist a few years after that he had a nobel prize for physics and began to be recognized as the genius of our modern era 10.