Success is never easy. It takes nerve-wracking, painful toil and to finally be able to achieve your goal. It’s a never-ending battle with yourself and everyone around you. The path of success and failure are somewhat exactly the same. Failure isn’t the enemy of success, success is what you get after going through failure but not losing determination or the will power to move further.
- Henry Ford
The creative genius behind the revolution that took the United States by a storm. In a few decades, the US witnessed what permanently changed the economic and social dynamic of the country. Starting from a self-built “farm-locomotive” he built an entire automobile industry.
Ford started working as a chief engineer at the main Detroit Edison Company plant and during service, in his free time, he invented his own gasoline-powered vehicle. People wanted him to make passenger vehicles but Ford insisted on improving the current model he was working on. Many people came and left his side but he was so clear in his head about what he had to do. That steadfastness, the clarity, the resolve made what people today know as the “Ford Motor Company”. It didn’t appear out of thin air, wasn’t handed to him on a platter, He worked for it and earned it for himself.
There’s no formula for success, no shortcuts, no hack to get the job done without any hard work.
- J.K. Rowling
The woman who owes her success to her publisher’s 8-year old daughter who read the manuscript for Harry Potter and fell in love with it. J.K. Rowling didn’t even have a computer to type her book so she manually wrote it and delivered it to publishers in hopes of getting it printed when one day Bloomsbury gave it another shot because the CEO’s daughter loved it.
She was rejected by 12 publishers before finally getting a publishing house to publish her book. She was paid £1,500 as advance for the first Harry Potter book and right now her net-worth is estimated to be around $1 billion making her one of the richest authors of the world.
“Fall seven times and stand up eight”
- Jack Ma
The living embodiment of this proverb is the Chinese business magnate,
Forbes magazine listed Ma as the 21st most powerful people in the world. Net-worth of around $50 billion, Jack Ma didn’t have it easy at all. In early childhood, it began the tale of never-ending failures. From failing his primary school examination not once but twice to failing thrice in his middle school examinations. Even when applying to universities after he got done with his high school, he failed his entrance exam twice and cleared it in the third go. Jack also claims to have applied to Harvard Business School ten times but had always been rejected each time. After he finally managed to get his bachelor’s degree, Jack tried his luck and applied for jobs and was rejected for about 30 times.
He recollected in an interview about applying for a job at KFC and from even there he was the only one who didn’t get selected out of the twenty-four that had applied. He was told that he was “no good” so many times in life but it still did not hinder him getting success. Today, Alibaba group is one of the largest groups in the world and Jack Ma stands among the richest men in the world.
- Colonel Harland David Sanders
Founder KFC – one of the biggest fast food chains in the world. Sanders used to work at a streetcar company as a conductor. He also worked as railroad fireman and insurance salesman. He then eventually started cooking different dishes at a roadside gas station. He perfected his recipe for the perfect ‘finger lickin good’ fried chicken, using a blend of 11 different spices, cooked in a pressure cooker to lock in all the goodness, flavor and moisture for the perfect fried chicken and opened his first ever KFC franchise in Utah in 1952.
This success and the fame did not come easy. It is stated that his recipe was rejected over 1000 times before finally being accepted by a restaurant which he called “Kentucky Fried Chicken”.
So success is never an easy journey. It demands effort, pain, determination, clarity, purpose and most of all the enthusiasm to keep moving forward no matter what result is.