Falling is inevitable. What matters is how well we rise after falling. Failure is experience and the most successful people have failed more times than they can count.
Let’s take a look at how some have fallen. We all know how well they have risen today.
- J.K. Rowling was an unemployed, divorced single mother when she wrote Harry Potter. Harry Potter was rejected by 12 publishing houses.
- Stephen King’s first novel was rejected 30 times.
- Starbucks wouldn’t exist today if Howard Schultz had given up after being turned down by banks 242 times.
- Walt Disney’s theme park concept was trashed 302 times.
- Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team for “lack of skill”.
- Oprah was fired from her role as reporter because she was “unfit for TV”.
- Albert Einstein was described as “mentally slow” by his teachers and expelled from school.
- Soichiro Honda was passed over for an engineering job at Toyota.
If any of these people didn’t rise after falling, the world as we know it would be different. What matters most is knowing what you want and believing that no matter what happens or what kind of failures may occur, you are going to keep going because that is who you are.
Falling gives us the gift of experience that we can use to achieve our goals. Only by falling can we learn what we need to become to rise up for the next chapter of our lives.
