Embrace Failure Until You Succeed

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." (Thomas Edison)

• Einstein's teachers said he would "never amount to anything."
• Scientist John Gurdon was told by a teacher that it would be "ridiculous" for him to go into science.
• J. K. Rowling received 12 rejections for her Harry Potter manuscript before it was accepted.
• Basketball legend Michael Jordan was cut from his high school varsity basketball team.
• Walt Disney was fired from his job at the Kansas City Star due to "lack of creativity".
• The inventor of the Xerox (photocopier) machine was rejected 20 times.
• Peanuts creator Charles Schulz's cartoons were all rejected by his high school yearbook.
• Thomas Edison failed at least 1000 times when creating inventions.
• Colonel Sanders was rejected dozens of times for his fried chicken recipe.  He didn't sell one franchise until the age of 65 when he was on Social Security.
• Fred Astaire was told:  "Can't sing.  Can't act.  Balding.  Can dance a little."  

If any one of these individuals had given up on their goals after failing, we wouldn't recognize their names today.  Too many people see failure as completely bad.  But failure is part of the process.  It's something we encounter on the road to success.    

It's all about perspective.  I have blogged a lot about authors and how they were finally discovered.  One author, rather than seeing her rejection letters as embarrassing, rather than seeing them as something to throw out, saves them all in a manila enveloppe marked "Tickets to the Game".  While she might not have a "yes" yet, she is still much further ahead than the author who doesn't stick her neck out at all.  At least she's in the game (http://alinefromlinda.blogspot.ca/2014/11/tickets-to-game.html).

The concept works in the field of science as well.  When Thomas Edison finally invented the lightbulb, someone asked him how he felt about failing 1000 times.  His response was:  "I never failed 1000 times.  The light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps."  Edison didn't apologize for his many failures.  He didn't make excuses.  He simply refused to give up.  He learned from his mistakes. "Failure is one of life's greatest teachers" (http://www.success.com/article/why-failure-is-good-for-success).

Look at the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.  Sadly, Apollo 1 never made it off the launch pad and its crew died in a deadly fire.  Apollo 13 made it out into space but as it approached the moon it had a major mechanical failure and had to circle the moon and return home.  But Apollo 11 did reach the moon, making the Americans the winners of the Space Race, and later of the Cold War.  The Space program involved great risk, but it also reaped great rewards.

Author John Maxwell wrote Failing Forward:  Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones to Success (https://www.amazon.ca/Failing-Forward-Turning-Mistakes-Stepping/dp/1491513136).  He reminds his readers that "great success depends on great risk".  He recommends to his readers to "confidently look the prospect of failure in the eye...to stop failing backwards and start failing forwards."  While society doesn't reward defeat, it does recognize those who turned their mistakes into stepping stones to success, like an author and her rejection slips or Thomas Edison and his lightbulb or the Space Race and its rockets.

Don't shy away from failure.  Embrace it...until you succeed.

http://pics-about-space.com/nasa-failures-and-successes?p=1

From the Silver Dart to the Avro Arrow

J. McCurdy pilots th eSilver Dart over Baddeck Bay circa 1909 courtesy http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/silver-dart-dawn-of-flight-in-canada-feature/.

Everyone knows that Alexander Graham Bell was responsible for the first telephone call in Canada.  However, many do not know his connection to the first successful flight in Canadian history.  It was in 1909 that the Silver Dart made its pioneer flight across the Bras d'Or Lake in Nova Scotia, the culmination of years of work by the Aerial Experiment Association started by Alexander Graham Bell.

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/archivianet/020117/020117030113_e.html

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Silver Dart's flight, Canada Post issued a stamp.  In the foreground sits the Silver Dart.  In the background are three delta winged aircraft which resemble the Avro Arrow, an aircraft decades ahead of its time.   In an effort to defend the Canadian Arctic from Soviet bombers, the RCAF was looking for an aircraft that would fly "faster, higher and further" than any other aircraft.  The Victory Aircraft Company had built dozens of bombers during the Second World War (http://members.shaw.ca/b.bogdan/Arrow/avro_arrow.htm).

Victory Aircraft, Toronto, Ontario circa 1941 to 1945 courtesy https://www.flickr.com/photos/98353311@N00/sets/72157627545751988/.

Purchased by a British businessman, it was renamed A. V. Roe.  By 1949, it built a jetliner which delivered airmail from Toronto to New York City at record speed.  However, with the onset of the Korean War, the project was scrapped.  In 1957, the sleek Avro Arrow was unveiled at the Toronto plant in front of a crowd of 12,000.  Its timing, however, was disastrous:  the Soviets launched the unmanned Sputnik on the same day, leading some to conclude that manned flights were a thing of the past.  The Space Race was on.

 https://vintagespace.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/fashioning-vostok-1/

Furthermore, only a week after the Avro Arrow debuted, John Diefenbaker was elected Prime Minister.  Distrusting the Avro Arrow executives, and chafing at the hefty price tag for production, he announced the program would be cut.  The end was swift.  Elwy Yost, a TVO movie critic who used to work at A.V. Roe, said that when officials came to shut down the program, he felt like he was back in Nazi Germany. Workers were whisked away from their desks.  The Arrow was chopped into pieces, all traces of the aircraft destroyed -- Canada's broken dream.

                              



                                 Avro Arrow unveiled at A.V. Roe Plant in Toronto circa 1957                                                              courtesy http://members.shaw.ca/b.bogdan/Arrow/avro_arrow.htm.

Carnegie's Letter Leads to Hill's Bestseller Think and Grown Rich

"Armed only with a letter of introduction from Carnegie, Hill set out to interview 500 people of the caliber of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, George Eastman, William Wrigley Jr. and Charles M. Schwab." (Marelisa Fabrega)

The Scottish-American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie challenged the up and comer Napoleon Hill:  interview 500 businessmen and find out their secret to success.  "Armed only with a letter of introduction from Carnegie, Hill set out to interview 500 people of the caliber of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, George Eastman, William Wrigley Jr. and Charles M. Schwab." (http://daringtolivefully.com/napoleon-hill-success)  It took him 20 years, with many bumps in the road, but Hill reached the finish line; and he came away with the bestseller Think and Grow Rich.

Napoleon Hill was born in a one-room log cabin in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia in 1883 to a life of poverty and illiteracy.  At 9 years old, his mother passed away.  Young Napoleon was angry.  Enamored with the outlaw Jesse James, Napoleon was known to wear a six shooter in his belt and terrorize the mountainside.  

His father soon remarried and his stepmother saw his potential.  She challenged young Napoleon to use his imagination for writing and spent the next year tutoring her stepson.  The new Mrs.  Hill offered to buy Napoleon a typewriter.  "If you become as good with a typewriter as you are with that gun, you may become rich and famous and known throughout the world." (http://www.success.com/mobile/article/rich-man-poor-man)

Napoleon rose to the challenge.  He found that he had a way with words and by 15 years old, he was a freelance reporter for mountain newspapers.  Soon he was writing for the Bob Taylor magazine where he was challenged to get an interview with Andrew Carnegie.  But it would not be as simple as picking up a telephone and placing a call.  Napoleon wrote not one but 50 letters to the steel magnate.  Finally, tired of seeing the same request, and admiring his persistence, Carnegie granted Hill his request.  The interview changed Hill's life.

Carnegie outlined a plan for Hill to write a book about the secrets to financial success by interviewing successful businessmen.  The steel magnate drafted a letter which gained Hill entrance to the offices of America's most sought after businessmen.  Hill discovered that all of the men he interviewed had several traits in common:  a definiteness of purpose; a strong belief in themselves; and an uncanny ability to bounce back from failure and adversity.

The latter trait served Hill well.  In 1926, he and the editor of the Canton Daily News, had just run an expose revealing Prohibition era gangsters and their operation of bootleg liquor which they had been distributing to local schoolchildren.  In gangster style, the editor was gunned down in cold blood.  The gangsters waited for Hill at his house, but the writer did not make it home after his car broke down. A nervous Hill received an anonymous note telling him to leave town, which he did.

In West Virginia, Hill had to make a clean start.  It was there that he re-committed himself to finishing the project that he had started under the guidance of Carnegie.  He wrote a book, Law of Success, which after many rejections, was published in 1928. 

Almost a decade after his first book came out, Hill secured a publisher for his second book, drawing on his original interviews with businessmen, called The Thirteen Steps to Riches.  Initially rejected, Hill's wife pleaded his case and the publisher relented under the condition that the title be changed to Use Your Noodle to Win More Boodle.  Mercifully, the title was changed later to Think and Grow Rich.  Within three weeks, Hill's new book was sold out.  By the end of the Great Depression, it had sold millions of copies.  By Hill's death in 1970, it had sold 20 million copies.  Today, it has sold over 70 million copies.  It all started with a letter signed by billionaire Andrew Carnegie.

Napoleon Hill circa 1904 courtesy http://www.success.com/mobile/article/rich-man-poor-man.

"Fledgling Invention" Hit by Lightning at Tutelo Heights

"The date of this letter, just two years after the patent was obtained, demonstrates the exceptional progress and evolution of this fledgling invention." (Bobby Livingston)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9026531/Alexander-Graham-Bell-letter-to-parents-about-telephone-sells-for-92000.html

It was on the shores of the Grand River at Tutelo Heights, Ontario, named after a Native tribe who migrated there after the Revolutionary War, that Alexander Graham Bell first conceived the idea for the telephone in 1874.  It was in a Boston laboratory that Bell, speaking to his assistant Thomas Watson, first transmitted speech through a telephone in March of 1876.  That July, back in Tutelo Heights, near Brantford, Bell first successfully transmitted speech over a telegraph line.  Four months later, the inventor, now a professor of speech at Boston University, received the telephone patent (http://www.brantford.ca/residents/WorkingLearning/Learning/BrantfordHistory/Pages/AlexanderGrahamBellBrantford.aspx).

Two years later, in 1878, Alexander Graham Bell wrote a letter to his parents in their Tutelo Heights home to demonstrate the ins and outs of telephone wiring.  He explained:  "I was quite troubled by the accident at Tutelo Heights," referring to a recent lightning strike on his parents' 10.5 acre property.  "The accident shows that the earth terminals of your telephone line are defective for the current found a shorter path to the ground through two of your poles than by the proper path." (www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2083066/Alexander-Graham-Bell-drawing-telephone-auction.html) 

Bobby Livingston, a representative for the auction company which sold Bell's letter in 2012, stated: "The early mechanics of the device [telephone] were complicated and required extreme attention to detail, without which results could be disastrous -- even fatal."  Bell wanted to make sure that his parents did not have such results.  He even included a detailed diagram of two telephones in his letter.  

Even so, Livingston points out the success of Bell's contraption:  "The date of this letter, just two years after the patent was obtained, demonstrates the exceptional progress and evolution of this fledgling invention."

Bell Homestead at Tutelo Heights, now part of Brantford, circa 1870's, courtesy http://www.museumsontario.ca/museum/Bell-Homestead-National-Histor.

William Gibson's "The Miracle Worker"

"As Helen, little Miss Duke is altogether superb, a plain, sullen, explosive, miniature monster whose destructive behavior makes sympathy for her afflictions impossible, but whose independence and vitality are nevertheless admirable." (New York Times review of The Miracle Worker at http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/theater/Miracle-Worker.pdf)

On October 19, 1959, William Gibson's play The Miracle Worker premiered at the Playhouse Theatre on Broadway.  Based on The Story of My Life, by Helen Keller, the play ran for almost two years, closing on July 1, 1961.

Tuscumbia, Alabama native Helen Keller went deaf and blind at 18 months of age when she was afflicted with Scarlet Fever.  Her parents felt such pity for her that they overindulged her and by six years old, she was a "wild, angry, tantrum-throwing" little girl en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miracle_Worker_(play).

Desperate to get their little girl back, the Keller's called on the Perkins Institute to help their child.  Alexander Graham Bell, who worked with the deaf, recommended a woman named Annie Sullivan.  Miss Sullivan agreed to work with Helen and, thanks to her consistency and perseverance, performed a "miracle" in the life of little Helen, teaching her how to communicate.

Helen Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life, was based on her years with her beloved teacher.  She dedicated it to Alexander Graham Bell.  For more information on the relationship between the two, read my post http://alinefromlinda.blogspot.ca/2013/08/helen-annie-alec.html.

The Broadway play starred Anne Bancroft as Anne Sullivan, Patty Duke as Helen Keller, Torin Thatcher as Captain Keller and Patricia Neal as Kate Keller.  The production won five Tony Awards and ran for 719 performances.  The movie version, which premiered in 1962, starred much of the same cast.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miracle_Worker_(play)