This is why we shouldn't be scared to fail

by Toby Maurice

Failure is difficult, no doubt about it.  No one is going to deny that.  Failure often makes you feel like a disappointment, and it can be discouraging.  Yet, failure is inevitable.  Think about it: Even the most successful people in the world experienced failure at some point in their lives.

 

A recent Entrepreneur article talked about some of the failures of the world's most successful individuals, both past and present.  Their stories are pretty interesting actually.

 

wipebook whiteboard notebook get engaged and take chances

College dropouts fuelled by passion

CAVEAT: I would NOT use the following examples to illustrate that school or even post secondary education for that matter is NON essential. 

 

But rather, I would hypothesize that the individuals provided below were ALL UBER motivated by the fact that they "dropped out" and didn't finish their degrees.  And I bet that they used the latter to get them out of bed every day to help drive them towards their ultimate goals.

 

  • Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College to become the father of all things Apple.
  • Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder, dropped out of Harvard, to help found, you guessed it Microsoft.
  • Larry Ellison, who now owns 98 percent of the Hawaiian Island of Lanai, dropped out of college twice.
  • Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, Inc., did not complete his Ph.D. program at Stanford University.

 

I bet ALL of  these guys likely felt like their college failures meant the end of a dream, but as we all know they OVERCAME these failures to become highly successful.

 

wipebook whiteboard notebook and flipchart with walt

Previous business failures

Statistically, a high percentage of entrepreneurs encounter business failures on their path to success.  Perhaps Walt Disney is one of the best examples of this.

 

For example, at 22, he was fired from the newspaper where he worked because he "lacked imagination."

 

GO FIGURE...

 

Later, he started Laugh-O-Gram Studios, which went bankrupt within two years. A few years later, Disney lost the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, who had been Disney's most successful character.

 

Now, as we ALL know, Disney is the most well-known name in animation.

 

Another entrepreneurial example, Michael Bloomberg, who has made his way in business as well as politics, was laid off from the company where he had been general partner for years.

 

DID YOU KNOW that Elon Musk was on vacation when he was fired as the CEO of PayPal.

 

SO... successful people get FIRED TOO.

 

wipebook whiteboard notebook hogwart express

Rejections - so what, par for the course

Rejection is tough...

 

But fortunately rejection sometimes opens the door to success in another area.

 

J.K. Rowling is practically the poster child for success after rejection.  The initial Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times.  Think about it: a dozen times you are told "No, not interested" but you keep going....

 

wipebook whiteboard notebook take chances and get engaged

Take chances... make mistakes

There you have it folks... take chances and make mistakes.  Don't be scared to fail.  At the end of the day, really successful people do.  Falling is easy, getting back up is the hard part because you have to get engaged and start over again.  The key to making a failure into a success is figuring out what you can learn from the experience and then making the changes to allow your failure to lead you toward something greater. 

 

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