It is said that failure is not the opposite of success, but a stepping stone to success. Hence, success after failure is guaranteed, provided one sticks to the goals and is persistent. If you read these success after failure stories, you will notice one common characteristic amongst all these people – commitment to what they wanted to do. Commitment to their dreams.
10 incredible stories of success after failure
#1. Henry Ford: Ford might be the leading brand world over, but his success wasn’t instant. Henry Ford went bankrupt five times before he founded the Ford company.
#2. Walt Disney: Disney was fired from his job because “he lacked imagination and had no good ideas”. After that, Disney started a number of businesses that didn’t last too long making him bankrupt before he established the multi-billion dollar corporation that we know of today.
#3. Akio Morita: Does this name sound familiar? Probably no. How about Sony? Does this sound very familiar? Well, that was his company whose first product was a rice cooker. The sale of this product was nothing short of abysmal. However, Morita and his partners at Sony kept pushing up the product range to make it a multi-billion dollar company.
#4. Orville and Wilbur Wright: The Wright brothers as they as popularly known as had to battle depression and family illness before starting a bicycle shop. It is in this shop that they experimented making a machine that could fly. After years of hard work and very many failed prototypes, they finally came up with a model that could fly and stay in air.
#5. Fred Astaire: After his first screen test, the director of MGM had this to say about Astaire, “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.” Astaire went on to become an incredibly successful actor, singer and dancer and kept that note in his Beverly Hills home to remind him of where he came from.
#6. Steven Spielberg: Spielberg was rejected by the University of Southern California School of Theater, Film and Television three times. He eventually attended school at another location, only to drop out to become a director before finishing.
#7. Ludwig van Beethoven: Young Beethoven was extremely awkward on the violin and was often so busy working on his own compositions that he neglected to practice. Despite his love of composing, his teachers felt he was hopeless at it and would never succeed with the violin or in composing. Beethoven kept plugging along, however, and composed some of the best-loved symphonies of all time–five of them while he was completely deaf.
#8. Stan Smith: Smith was rejected from even being a ball boy for a Davis Cup tennis match because the organizers felt he was far too clumsy and uncoordinated. Smith went on to prove them wrong, by winning Wimbledon, U. S. Open and eight Davis Cups.
#9. Jack London: This well-known American author had to face nearly six hundred rejections for his first story before he could manage to get published popular novels like White Fang and The Call of the Wild.
#10. J. K. Rowling: Rowling was divorced, nearly penniless, surviving on welfare, facing depression, living in a car, raising a child on her own while attending school and writing a novel. Rowling went from depending on welfare to becoming one of the richest women in the world in a span of only five years through her hard work and determination.