My good friend Christy Dreiling posted a great post a while back on Facebook. It was a reminder to keep on going even when we are feeling like there is just no hope or when others are telling us we are not good enough or smart enough or not knowledgeable enough when pursuing what we want. Many have been told these things but pushed on. They took these negative comments and used it as fuel to keep going in life. So to this I say, join the ranks of these "Losers"
Jimi Hendrix and his band opened for the Monkeys once and got booed off of stage. They were consequently dropped from the tour. Can you imagine?
Emily Dickinson gave her poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson to review, and while he was impressed, he advised against publishing them because they were too peculiar. She was totally enamored of him anyway and replied to his criticisms by saying that she had "few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you, my tears would block my tongue."
Winston Churchill failed the Royal Military entrance exams twice.
Colonel Sanders : The founder of KFC. He started his dream at 65 years old! He got a social security check for only $105 and was mad. Instead of complaining he did something about it.He thought restaurant owners would love his fried chicken recipe, use it, sales would increase, and he’d get a percentage of it. He drove around the country knocking on doors, sleeping in his car, wearing his white suit.Do you know how many times people said no till he got one yes? 1009 times!
Albert Eistein: He didn’t speak till he was four and didn’t read till seven. His parents and teachers thought he was mentally handicapped. He only turned out to win a Nobel prize and be the face of modern physics.
Thomas Edison: No list of success from failures would be complete without the man who gave us many inventions including the light bulb. He knew failure wouldn’t stop him. "If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward."
Stephenie Meyer: The author of the crazy Twilight series said the inspiration from the book came from a dream. She finished it in three months but never intended to publish it until a friend suggested she should.She wrote 15 letters to literary agencies. Five didn’t reply. Nine rejected. One gave her a chance. Then eight publishers auctioned for the right to publish Twilight. She got a three book deal worth $750,000. In 2010, Forbes reported she earned $40 million.
Theodor Seuss Giesel: Dr. Seuss gave us Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham. Books every child reads. At first many didn’t think he would succeed. 27 different publishers rejected Dr. Seuss’s first book To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.
Vincent Van Gogh: He only sold one painting in his lifetime! Just one to a friend. Despite that he kept painting and finished over 800 pieces. Now everyone wants to buy them and his mostexpensive painting is valued at $142.7 million.
Richard Branson: He’s a billionaire mogul of Virgin but has had his share of failures. Remember Virgin Cola or Virgin credit cards? Probably not. He’s lost hundreds of millions of dollars but has not let failure stop him. When you’re rich like him you can rent his private island for $53,000 a night.
Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind was rejected by 38 publishers before it finally got green-lighted.
Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was writing for nine years before he hit it big "“ and reportedly only made $20 from his writing for those first nine years.
Lucille Ball got sent home from acting school in New York because the teachers thought she was too shy and would never make it as an actress.
Walt first tried to get MGM studios to distribute Mickey Mouse in 1927, he was told that the idea would never work because a giant mouse on the screen would terrify women.
Jerry Seinfield: the first time the young comedian walked on stage at a comedy club, he looked out at the audience, froze and was eventually booed off of the stage.
Fred Astaire: In his first screen test, the testing director of MGM noted that Astaire, "Can't act. Can't sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little."
Sydney Poitier: After his first audition, Poitier, who grew up poor in the Bahamas, was told by the casting director, "Why don't you stop wasting people's time and go out and become a dishwasher or something?"
Three-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone dropped out of Yale to write his first novel, which was later rejected by publishers. When it was finally published in 1998, the novel was not well-received and Stone moved to Vietnam to teach English
Steven Spielberg was rejected from the University of Southern California School of Theater, Film and Television three times.He eventually attended school at another location, only to drop out to become a director before finishing.
When The Beatles were just starting out, a recording company told them no. Decca Recording studios, who had recorded 15 songs with the group, said "we don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out. They have no future in show business."
In 1973, Stephen King was working as an English teacher in Maine and selling short stories on the side to make ends meet. That same year, he accepted a $2,500 advance for his first novel "Carrie" to Doubleday but after 30 rejections, King decided to give up on the book.At the urging of his wife, King later resubmitted the manuscript and now, after having hundreds of books published, King is one of the best-selling authors of all time and "Carrie" is on its second movie re-make.As of 2011, total sales for King’s books were estimated to be between 300 and 350 million copies.
After being cut from his high school basketball team, a young Michael Jordan went home and cried in the privacy of his bedroom.But Jordan didn't let this early-in-life setback stop him from playing the game and the basketball superstar has stated, "I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
Steve Jobs was a college dropout, a fired tech executive and an unsuccessful businessman.At 30-years-old he was left devastated after being unceremoniously removed from the company he founded.In a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, Jobs explained, "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. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."
Before he was Wolverine on "X-Men" or a Broadway star, actor Hugh Jackman got fired from his cashier job at 7-Eleven."I got fired after six weeks because the (boss) said I talked too much to the customers," Jackman explained to Us Weekly.
In 1954, Elvis was still a no-name performer, and Jimmy Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, fired Elvis Presley after just one performance telling him, "You ain't goin' nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin' a truck."Elvis went on to become the second best-selling artists of all time
Oprah Winfrey was fired from one of her first jobs because she was "unfit for TV.
What is holding you back from getting what you want in life? Go get it!!
