Preview

Every Success Story Is Also a Story of Great Failure

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
762 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Every Success Story Is Also a Story of Great Failure
EVERY SUCCESS STORY IS ALSO A STORY OF GREAT FAILURE

Failure is the highway to success. Tom Watson Sr. said, "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate."

If you study history, you will find that all stories of success are also stories of great failures. But people don't see the failures. They only see one side of the picture and they say that person got lucky: "He must have been at the right place at the right time."

Let me share someone's life history with you. This was a man who failed in business at the age of 21 ; was defeated in a legislative race at age 22; failed again in business at age 24; overcame the death of his sweetheart at age 26; had a nervous breakdown at age 27; lost a congressional race at age 34; lost a senatorial race at age 45; failed in an effort to become vice-president at age 47; lost a senatorial race at age 49; and was elected president of the United States at age 52.

This man was Abraham Lincoln.

Would you call him a failure? He could have quit. But to Lincoln, defeat was a detour and not a dead end.

A New York Times editorial on December 10, 1903, questioned the wisdom of the Wright Brothers who were trying to invent a machine, heavier than air, that would fly. One week later, at Kitty Hawk, the Wright Brothers took their famous flight.

Colonel Sanders, the starter of KFC, at age 65, with a beat-up car and a $100 check from Social Security, realized he had to do something. He remembered his mother's recipe and went out selling. How many doors did he have to knock on before he got his first order? It is estimated that he had knocked on more than a thousand doors before he got his first order. How many of us quit after three tries, ten tries, a hundred tries, and then we say we tried as hard as we could?

As a young cartoonist, Walt Disney faced many rejections from newspaper editors, who said he had no talent. One day a minister at a church hired him to draw some cartoons. Disney was working out of a small

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    to continue,in my believe failure can lead to success because it will make you braver(be better at it). this belief has influence on how you did something wrong, where you can actually go back to it and fix the wrong and be a better leader next time by…

    • 623 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it." - Mia Hamm. Failure happens to everyone. The only thing that separates people who succeed from those who don't is, the understanding of failure. However we cannot be successful in everything we partake in.…

    • 267 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    In order to be successful it is necessary to fail a few times. For example, when learning how to swim, you are not going to start swimming once you get into the water. Although you failed, you continued to try to swim until you were successful.…

    • 309 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The lessons we take from failure can be fundamental to later success. Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?…

    • 275 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Wright Brothers

    • 813 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Everyday millions of people fly in an airplane but no one person knows who is responsible. The ones who are responsible are the Wright Brothers. On December 17, 1903 the Wright Brothers did the unthinkable, invented the airplane (Wright-Brothers.Org). The airplane is still widely used today and every day. As a result of the invention of the airplane the Wright Brothers forever changed aviation history. The Brothers invented the airplane, officially started the “air race,” and created new technology.…

    • 813 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Fixed vs Growth

    • 504 Words
    • 2 Pages

    failures as ways of becoming smarter as you learn from each and every one of them. The…

    • 504 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved the first sustained flight with a machine that weighed more than air, and with a pilot flying the aircraft. The twelve-second flight, with Orville at the controls, was a revolutionary event in American history. Airplanes were now being manufactured for all sorts of reasons; they were all based on the Kitty Hawk Flyer’s design. The Wright Brothers’ first flight created a whole new world of transportation for both civilian and military purpose.…

    • 576 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Failure is something that we cannot go through life without experiencing. The best thing about failure is that failure can be used as a great learning experience to improve upon things in our lives and career. Using failure as a learning tool is dependent upon the person and how they view it as well as how they use it. Failure is a matter of perspective and the lessons in failure are important aspects towards growth and development. If we did not experience failure there wouldn’t be opportunities for learning. Failure can teach us about ourselves as well as provide an understanding for our strengths and weaknesses and even provide motivation (Mindtools.com, 2012).…

    • 2230 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The question of failure is, in fact, a success in itself. I frame my life knowing that every obstruction and challenge faced is just a lesson waiting to be learned. The circumstances that genuinely made me believe this philosophy happened when I began working at Chick-Fil-A. Starting my work at the offset of 16 I promised myself that I was going to prove to the management that I was going to progress to become one of the best. Throughout the years of working there I upheld my promise and worked my way up to become a Team Leader. The youngest Team leader ever to work at that Chick-Fil-A.…

    • 544 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Overcoming Failure

    • 328 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In which, I include Colonel Sanders failed plenty of times before he was able to find the right recipe for what’s for known today as KFC one of the world’s best fried chicken restaurants. Colonel Sanders tried over 1,009 times before the recipe was successful. Now that its successful there are KFC’s restaurants all over the world.…

    • 328 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    In life, failures occasionally happen. It befalls on everybody. However, failures don’t label us as a person but can build you as one of those experiences. The person who succeeds without first failing hasn't truly learned anything. In failures, there can be a learning experience and an opportunity to develop. Throughout my seventeen years, I've encountered my own share of blunders, each teaching me a new lesson.…

    • 401 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In 1903 in the hills of North Carolina a pair of brothers conceived an idea that men could fly. These brothers were the pioneers of powered flight. The Wright brothers were the first people to have a powered flight.. This flight was not long, or high, but was enough to fuel a generation of engineers to explore the expedition of flight.…

    • 565 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    For some people it takes forever to figure out that failure is not always a bad thing, while at the time it may seem like the end of the world. “We are all potentially capable of any human act.” (Roth 39). Even the most successful of people have failed at something at least once in their lives. Maybe consider though, that failure was what brought them back up to the best, hardest working person that they could be and it did not take long for them to retrieve what they had lost and made it ten times better!…

    • 781 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Not failing doesn’t make you successful but the reaction towards failure helps to buffer the experiences that you’ve had. I have one response to failure-pragmatism, being pragmatic that if one door has closed other will surely open. Failure gives me an incentive to hit it back harder. Failure has given me clarity of sticking to myself and snatched me away from distracting me from the core. Failure is a fiendish friend it lets you know who your real friends are and the strength of your relationship is tested in strong…

    • 1374 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Failure is one word that no one wants to hear. It is something we all fear and hope to never experience, yet is a part of all our lives. We fail math tests, English essays, job interviews, progress reports; we all fail something. These are all easily measurable, tangible failures with calculable consequences. However, failure is defined as “a lack of success”. This “lack of success” extends much farther than just tangible actions. The biggest failure is when we fail ourselves.…

    • 713 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays

Related Topics