Famous Failures Part 2

A university professor started off his class by picking out of his back pocket, a 20-pound note. And in this lecture hall of about 200 people, he asked, how many of you would like this note. Naturally, all 200 hands went up. He said interesting, he then said before I let you have it let me ask you this question. He took the note and folded it in half twice and then he said, how many of you want this note. Still, 200 hands went up. Now he said, let me try something else. He took the note and he crumpled it, then he said how many of you want this note now. Still, 200 hands went up. Finally, he chucked the note on the floor, he screwed it with his shoe and crumpled it, even more, picked it back up, now with dirt and said, how many of you want this note. All 200 hands are still up.

He said, today you've learned an important lesson, no matter how much I crumpled that note, how much I squinched it up, how many times it was trodden on, you still wanted It, because it was still worth twenty pounds. In the same way that twenty-pound note held its value, so do you? No matter how many times life will tread on you, life will crumple you, life will scrunch you and life will squeeze you, you will always keep your value that spark within us, all of bliss, knowledge and eternity that exists. That spark will never be taken away. Our value is not created by the price of our clothes or our bank balance or the job title that we have. See we should be building a life and not just building our CVs.

 

In the middle of 2009, he was the software engineer that no one wanted to hire. He had 12 years of experience at Yahoo but he was rejected by Facebook and then rejected by Twitter. He’d been to a great university, and he had a great CV but he decided to team up with one of his alumni members at Yahoo and started to create an app and focus on the startup space. In five years' time, he sold that out for 19 billion dollars to Facebook. Believe it or not, that was Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp. When he was rejected from Facebook, he said “it was a great opportunity to connect with some fantastic people and look forward to life's next adventure”. When he was rejected by Twitter, he responded by saying “That’s ok. Would have been a long commute”. It’s so interesting to see that someone rejected from two of the top Internet companies actually responded with humour and as he responded with positivity.

 

This lady was diagnosed with clinical depression, her marriage had failed and she was jobless with a dependent child. She was on a four-hour delayed train journey from Manchester to London when she came up with this idea and she started to write this book about this wizard. And as she started writing, she then finished her manuscript, took it to the 12 publishers and she was rejected by all 12. Believe it or not, that's J.K. Rowling. She was the one who wrote a seven-volume children's fantasy series, Harry Potter.

 

This man watched his first company crumble. He was a Harvard University dropout and his first company's demo didn't even work. He went on to build Microsoft, his name's Bill Gates.

 

Therefore failure is just a sign that we need to widen our scope. We need to be ready and build ourselves up for the next level. Actually what we end up achieving is far greater than what we'd envisioned for ourselves. And this divine plan, this orchestration can't be happening without this intervention that occurs. Because if we had it our way, we just settle, we just accept what we thought was our goal or what we thought we were chasing. But actually, I've noticed that when you don't get that later down the line, you look back and you reflect and realize that what you've gained is so much greater.

Failure is only failures when we don't learn from them, because when we learn from them they become lessons. And we actually extrapolate all of these teachings and actually get more insight into, how we can improve the way we were and how we can actually drive with a different energy. The challenge we have is that we only talk about people's failures when they succeed and that's why they become this taboo, what we feel like their failures never happened. We need to share these stories earlier, we need to bring out these stories and experiences on the journey. So that people who are on the journey can actually follow in those footsteps. And that's why Steve Jobs said, “you can't connect the dots moving forward, you only can when you're looking backwards”.

 

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