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 lightbulb, he said, I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. 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 For 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 1,009 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 bestseller lists. But King wasn't born with the 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 Carrie 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 6 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. Astaire 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 Astaire, 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. 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, yet he 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. 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. 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. When you were a child, you probably read Green Eggs and Ham, and The Cat in the Hat, as well as other books written by Dr. Seuss. To date, over 600 million copies of his books have been sold all over the world. Many would think that this kind of success means that all sorts of doors of opportunity were open for Dr. Seuss. However, his first book, and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street, almost didn't get published. After Mulberry Street was rejected for the 27th time, Dr. Seuss decided to head home to burn the book's manuscript. However, at the last minute, a break came, paving the way for publication and a glowing review that transformed this first book into an instant bestseller. This ultimately paved the way for the success of his other books. So there you have it. Ten famous failures who went on to find success in life. Hopefully, these famous failure stories have inspired you to continue working on an important goal. Even though these people are all world-famous now, they once encountered challenges just like you. Now, if you want to learn how to model their behavior, then be sure to check out our video on the 12 Mourning Habits of the World's Most Successful People. 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