Copyright 2008, Susan DeLay
Nobody wants to be a failure. The skier falling down a mountain slope is famous for that one tumble. Who cares that he probably swooshed down the death trails hundreds of times before? No one will remember him for anything besides his defeat, which had to be agony if only because The Wide World of Sports aired it week after week, year after year.
Remember Bill Riegels? Probably not, unless I refer to him as “the guy who ran 65 yards down the field in the wrong direction and stopped one yard short of scoring a touchdown for the opposing team.” That happened in 1929 during a Rose Bowl game. He was known as Wr ong Way for the rest of his life.
Dan Quayle is more famous for how he misspelled potato (or is it potatoe?) than he is for being Vice-President.
The guy who built the Titanic reached failure of titanic proportions, but no one really remembers his name and besides, he went down with the ship.
Not everyone who goes down stays down. It’s thinking about the people who kept getting back on their feet that should keep us going when we have to stand on tip toes and reach up to touch ground.
Most know that J.K. Rowling, who authored the Harry Potter books, wasn’t always the twelfth richest woman in England. For years she lived in a cramped, mouse-infested apartment and relied on food stamps to help her make ends meet. She wrote longhand because she didn’t have a computer. And editors at twelve different publishers turned her down. Hmmm. Would that be considered failure or just bad judgment? I can’t help but wonder what those editors are doing now. Seven books later, Rowling is richer than the Queen and in the field of entertainment, only Oprah is wealthier, I want to fail like J.K. did!
Who hasn’t heard of Walt Disney? He, too, failed. An editor fired Disney from his job at a newspaper because he lacked imagination and had no original ideas. Isn’t that a bit like firing Billy Graham because he lacks a personal relationship with Jesus and he doesn’t know how to pray?
Albert Einstein, clearly at the top of the intelligence food chain, couldn’t pass the entrance exams to the Swiss Polytechnic Institute in Zurich. And the institute specializes in chemistry, math, science, more science, oh, and science. Even political science. If Einstein, the most famous scientist in the history of the universe, couldn’t get in, how is they have ever had any students? I suppose it’s all relative.
Sharon Stone couldn’t get a date to her prom. (If she couldn’t get a date, then the school’s mascot must have been a seeing-eye dog.)
Poor Tommy. He had two strike s against him. He didn’t speak until he was four and then he didn’t really say much until he was in third grade. When he was in grade school, a teacher told him he was too stupid to learn anything. An advisor suggested he become a high school drop out because his teachers didn’t believe he’d ever amount to much. Later on, he was known as The Wizard of Menlo Park. Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents for his inventions—including the light bulb. Let’s hope those teachers all took advantage of that invention since apparently they were all in the dark before.
Steven Spielberg was a two-time high school drop out. (Not that dropping out of school guarantees a brilliant career in the movies.) He couldn’t hack it, so after his sophomore year, he phoned home and said, “Come and get me. I’m blowing this pop stand.” When he was persuaded to return, teachers placed him in a class for the learning disabled. A month later, he quit again.
Even Bill Gates knows about failure. His first business was a company called Traf-O-Data, designed to analyze the flow of traffic. Lucky for him (and for us), it bombed. He went on to start Microsoft and now he has more money than J.K., Oprah, and the Queen put together.
Maybe what Napoleon Hill said about failure is true: Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibility.
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