4 famous
failures that became massive successes
From
Apple to Disney to KFC, the shared thread among these companies is massive
failure before massive success.
Throughout my years as a journalist, failure is probably the most
frequent subject I’ve talked about with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and
tech industry CEOs. It’s a subject virtually all of them have admitted to being
personally familiar with. In fact, most of the VCs and CEOs I’ve spoken with
say they would be loath to invest in someone, either through funding or
offering them a job, if that person hasn’t personally experienced failure
before.
Failure is fundamental to our growth. If we can learn from what
went wrong and why we know what to avoid or alter in the future to avoid a
repeat. Or as Bill Gates once put it: “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces
smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
Of course failure is no fun when you are living through it, and
it’s often months or years before we can look back at it and recognize it for
the great teacher it is. To find examples of this look no further than the four
examples below of famous “failures” who would not have achieved massive success
had they given up.
COLONEL SANDERS
Colonel Harland David Sanders is one of my favorite stories of a
person who turned a string of failures into success. It’s because his success–franchising
his “Kentucky Fried Chicken” secret recipe, which made him a millionaire–didn’t
happen until he was 62, showing massive success isn’t limited to the young and
can occur any time in your life.
Before Sanders found success with his recipe, he had multiple
other failed careers, including as a lawyer and as a salesman selling various
wares including lamps, insurance, and tires. But what’s most incredible about
Sanders’s story is that he reportedly failed over 1,000 times to sell his
chicken recipe. It wasn’t until his 1,010th time in trying to sell the recipe
that he got someone to bite–and the rest is history. Had Sanders decided to
give up after hearing his 10th, 100th, or even 1,000th “no” the fast food
industry would be a very different landscape today.
ROVIO
Rovio is one of the biggest gaming success stories of all-time.
Its Angry Birds franchise has been a staple of mobile gaming since its release
in December 2009–and by 2012 the franchise has hit over one billion downloads.
Further, Angry Birds made the successful transition from video games to
merchandising, television shows, and even a full-length feature film with the
sequel due out next year. Given this, you’d think Rovio simply had success
built into its DNA. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Matter of
fact, from its founding (as Relude Oy) in 2003 until the launch of Angry Birds
in 2009, Rovio pretty much only knew failure. The company had developed and
released 51 previous games–all of which failed to become hits. As Pekka
Rantala, the former CEO of Rovio, told me in 2015:
“When Rovio [then called Relude] was established in 2003, it was
just a normal, very small startup, making mobile games. It was difficult for
them during the first six years. They managed to bring to market more than 50
different games, but none of them were particularly successful. They were
really tight on resources and money; by 2009, they were really close to going
bankrupt. And then came this 52nd game in December 2009, and that really
changed everything, as the saying goes.”
Because the developers at Rovio didn’t give up even after their
50th failure, the company now boasts almost 400 employees and had almost $300
million in revenue in 2017.
STEVE JOBS AND APPLE
No list of famous failures would be complete without both Steve
Jobs and Apple. But Jobs’s and Apple’s failure is a bit different than others
on this list as the man and the company had massive success in their early
years before failing hard. Jobs was famously forced out of Apple–the company he
founded–in 1985. It’s hard not to see yourself as a failure after that. After
Jobs’s departure, the company itself entered a downward spiral, going from the
leader of the personal computer revolution in the 1970s to an also-ran by the
1990s.
Then in 1997, with Apple just months away from bankruptcy, Jobs
returned to the company and by 2011 not only turned Apple into the biggest
company on the planet, but fundamentally changed the computing, music, and
smartphone industries by giving us the iMac, iPod, and iPhone. Think how
different the tech world would be today had Jobs let his failure get the best
of him. No wonder in 2005, Jobs said, “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out
that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened
to me.”
WALT DISNEY
Perhaps the most iconic entertainment company to have ever existed
is the Walt Disney Company. The company’s characters like Mickey Mouse and
Donald Duck are beloved the world over. But far from just peddling in cartoons,
the House of Mouse has influenced our culture thanks to everything from its
theme parks to feature films. Today, Disney has created or owns some of the
most recognizable brands in pop culture, including Marvel Comics and Star Wars,
and Pixar.
But the entertainment landscape could have been very different if
Walt Disney would have succumbed to his prior failures. In his early twenties,
Disney was fired from a Missouri newspaper for “not being creative enough.”
Then in 1921 Disney founded his first animation studio, Laugh-O-Gram Studio, in
Kansas City, Missouri. It went bankrupt within two years. It’s only after this
failure that Disney decided to move west to pursue his dreams in Hollywood. The
rest, as they say, is history. After picking up the pieces from his past
failures, Disney would found the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, which would
later become the Walt Disney Studio, in 1923. Over the course of his life,
Disney would receive 59 nominations for the Academy Awards, winning 22 of them.
As Walt Disney said in 1957: “All the adversity I’ve had in my
life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it
when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for
you.”
BY MICHAEL
GROTHAUS
https://www.fastcompany.com/90217870/4-famous-failures-that-became-massive-successes?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Daily&position=7&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=08202018
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