Failure Doesn’t Exist

“My Grandmother used to say ‘never let failure go to your heart, and never let success go to your head.’ “—Will Smith

Today’s “Secrets For Money” is wisdom gleaned from some very famous people that never gave up, people who know the secret that there is no such thing as failure.

What we might perceive as failure oftentimes leads to our greatest success. It is just that we must harness resilience, persistence and adapt, in effort to reach our goals.

Here are some reminders of this—that even when things look bleak there is opportunity.

“It’s not whether you get knocked down; it’s whether you get back up.”
—Vince Lombardi

* Michael Jordan was cut from his High School Basketball team. Jordan once said, “I’ve failed over and over again in my life. That is why I succeed.”

* When asked by a reporter did he feel like a failure after hundreds of unsuccessful attempts to make a lightbulb.

To which Edison relied: “I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those seven hundred ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work. I will find the way that will work.”

* Albert Einstein did not speak until he was 4-years-old and did not read until he was 7. His parents thought he was “sub-normal,” and one of his teachers described him as “mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in foolish dreams.” He was expelled from school and was refused admittance to the Zurich Polytechnic School.

* Jimmy Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, fired Elvis Presley in 1954, after one performance. He told Presley, “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.”

* Leo Tolstoy flunked out of college; Tolstoy was described as “unable and unwilling to learn.”

* After Fred Astaire’s first screen test, the memo from the testing director of MGM, dated 1933, read, “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.”  Fred Astaire kept that memo over the fireplace in his Beverly Hills home.

Way before building Disneyland, a newspaper editor fired Walt Disney because the editor felt Disney “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”

* Winston Churchill failed sixth grade. He then lost every public office election until he became Prime Minister at the age of 62. Churchill later wrote, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never, Never, Never, Never give up.”

Copyright © 2009 by Mara Rogers of Secrets for Money http://www.SecretsForMoney.info

Photo Credit: This photograph “Chicory flower” by aussiegall. For more of this Photographer’s work: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aussiegall/ and http://www.flickr.com/people/aussiegall/

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