26 Successful People Who Failed At First

26 Successful People Who Failed At First

We always hear the success stories but we rarely hear about the struggles and failures of the world's most successful people. Here then, are 26 famous winners who started with a whimper.

1. Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade. He was defeated in every public office role he ran for. Then he became the British prime minister at the age of 62.

2. Thomas Edison's teachers told him he was "too stupid to learn anything." Edison also famously invented 1,000 light bulbs before creating one that worked.

3.Harland David Sanders, the famous KFC "Colonel," couldn't sell his chicken. More than 1,000 restaurants rejected him. But then one did, and today there are KFC restaurants bearing his image all over the world.

4. R.H. Macy had a history failing businesses, including a dud Macy's in NYC. But Macy kept up the hard work and ended up with the biggest department store in the world.

5. Steven Spielberg was rejected from his dream school, the University of Southern California, three times. He sought out an education somewhere else and dropped out to be a director.

6. Charlie Chaplin's act was rejected by executives because they thought it was too obscure for people to understand. But then they took a chance on Chaplin, who went on to become America's first bona fide movie star.

7. Marilyn Monroe's first contract with Columbia Pictures expired because they told her she wasn't pretty or talented enough to be an actress.

8. Soichiro Honda was passed over for an engineering job at Toyota and left unemployed. But then he began making motorcycles, started a business and became a billionaire.

9. Vera Wang failed to make the U.S. Olympic figure-skating team. Then she became an editor at Vogue and was passed over for the editor-in-chief position. She began designing wedding gowns at 40 and today is the premier designer in the business, with a multi-billion dollar industry.

10. Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because he "lacked imagination and had no good ideas." Several more of his businesses failed before the premiere of his movie Snow White. Today, most childhoods wouldn't be the same without his ideas.

11. Albert Einstein didn't speak until age four and didn't read until age seven. His teachers labeled him "slow" and "mentally handicapped." But Einstein just had a different way of thinking. He later won the Nobel prize in physics.

12. Charles Darwin was considered an average student. He gave up on a career in medicine and was going to school to become a parson. But as Darwin studied nature, he found his calling.

13. Sir Isaac Newton was tasked with running the family farm but was a miserable failure. Newton was sent off to Cambridge University and became a physics scholar.

14. Dick Cheney flunked out of Yale twice. George W. Bush once joked: "So now we know –if you graduate from Yale, you become president. If you drop out, you get to be vice president."

15. The first time Jerry Seinfeld went onstage, he was booed away by the jeering crowd. Eventually, he became a famous comic with one of the most-loved sitcoms ever.

16. In Fred Astaire's first screen test, the judges wrote: "Can't act. Can't sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little." Astaire went on to be the most famous dancer of all time and won the hearts of American women forever.

17. After Sidney Poitier's first audition, the casting director instructed him to just stop wasting everyone's time and "go be a dishwasher or something." He went on to win an Academy Award and is admired by actors everywhere.

18. Oprah Winfrey was fired from her television reporting job because they told her she wasn't fit to be on screen. But Winfrey rebounded and became the undisputed queen of television talk shows. She's also a billionaire.

19. Lucille Ball spent many years on the B-list and her agent told her to pursue a new career. Then she got her big break on I Love Lucy.

20. After his first film, Harrison Ford underwhelmed the producer and was told he would probably never succeed. But today Ford is the third highest-grossing actor of all time.

21. Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting in his entire life, to a friend. He sometimes starved in order to create the 800 paintings he'd eventually do. Today, his works are priceless.

22. Dr. Seuss' first book was rejected by 27 different publishers. He's now the most popular children's book author ever.

23. Henry Ford's first auto company went out of business. He abandoned a second because of a fight and a third went downhill because of declining sales. He went on to become one of the greatest American entrepreneurs ever.

24. While developing his vacuum, Sir James Dyson went through 5,126 failed prototypes and his savings over 15 years. But the 5,127th prototype worked and now the Dyson brand is the best-selling vacuum cleaner in the United States.

25. J.K. Rowling was unemployed, divorced and raising a daughter on social security while writing the first Harry Potter novel. J.K. Rowling is now internationally renowned for her 7 book Harry Potter series and is the first person to become a billionaire from writing.

26. Stephen King was initially so frustrated with his first novel, Carrie that he threw it in the trash. King's wife found the manuscript in the trash and took it out. To date his 49 novels have sold 350 million copies.

Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.

Every creative soul -- it does not matter what he creates -- should be respected and honored, so that creativity is honored. But even politicians get Nobel Prizes -- who are nothing but clever criminals.

It does not matter whether you paint, sculpt, or make shoes; whether you are a gardener, a farmer, a fisherman, a carpenter -- it does not matter. What matters is, are you putting your very soul into what you are creating? Then your creative products have something of the quality of divine. Except creativity, there is nothing divine.

If you want to create, you have to get rid of all conditionings otherwise your creativity will be nothing but copying, it will be just a carbon copy. You can be creative only if you are an individual, you cannot create as a part of the mob psychology. The mob psychology is uncreative; it lives a life of drag, it knows no dance, no song, no joy; it is mechanical.

Of course, there are a few things you will get from the society only if you are mechanical: respectability you will get, honors you will get. Universities will confer D.Litts on you, countries will give you gold medals, you may finally become a Nobel laureate, but this whole thing is ugly.

A real man of genius will discard all this nonsense, because this is bribery. Giving the Nobel prize to a person simply means that your services to the establishment are respected, that you are honored because you have been a good slave, obedient, that you have not gone astray, that you have followed the well-trodden path.

The creator cannot follow the well-trodden path, he has to search out his own way, he has to inquire in the jungles of life, he has to go alone, he has to be a dropout from the mob mind, from the collective psychology. The collective mind is the lowest mind in the world; even the so-called idiots are a little more superior than the collective idiocy. But the collectivity has its own bribes: it respects people, honors people, if they go on insisting that the way of the collective mind is the only right way. It was out of sheer necessity that in the past, creators of all kinds -- the painters, the dancers, the musicians, the poets, the sculptors -- had to renounce respectability. They had to live a kind of bohemian life, the life of a vagabond; that was the only possibility for them to be creative. 

Humanity will really only be born the day the individual is respected in his rebellion. Humanity has still not been born; it is still in the womb. What you see as humanity is only a very hocus-pocus phenomenon. Unless we give individual freedom to each person, absolute freedom to each person to be himself, to exist in his own way.