27 People – If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again. [Image]

27 People and their stories that will motivate you!

Arianna Huffington

Huffington’s second book, which she tried to publish long before she created the now ubiquitously recognizable Huffington Post empire, was rejected 36 times before it was eventually accepted for publication.
Arianna Huffington is a Greek American author, syndicated columnist, and occasional actress. She is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post.

George Steinbrenner

Before Steinbrenner made a name for himself when he acquired ownership of the New York Yankees, he owned a small basketball team called the Cleveland Pipers back in 1960. By 1962, as a result of Steinbrenner’s direction, the entire franchise went bankrupt.
Eventually he led the team to an amazing comeback, with six World Series entries between 1996 and 2003, and a record as one of the most profitable teams in Major League Baseball.

Oprah Winfrey

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She has stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teens and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. She was fired from many jobs with one saying that she was “too emotionally involved in the stories”.
Oprah Gail Winfrey is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist.

Walt Disney

Disney was fired from a newspaper because he was told he lacked creativity. Disney formed his first animation company, which was called Laugh-O-Gram Films. He raised $15,000 for the company but eventually was forced to close Laugh-O-Gram, following the close of an important distributor partner.
Desperate and out of money, Disney found his way to Hollywood and faced even more criticism and failure until finally, his first few classic films started to skyrocket in popularity.
Walt Disney was an American entrepreneur, animator, voice actor and film producer. A pioneer of the American animation industry, he introduced several developments in the production of cartoons.

Steve Jobs

Jobs found success in his 20s when Apple became a massive empire, but when he was 30, Apple’s board of directors decided to fire him.
Jobs then founded a new company, NeXT, which was eventually acquired by Apple. Once back at Apple, Jobs proved his capacity for greatness by reinventing the company’s image and delivering the iPod and iPhone.
Steve Jobs was an American information technology entrepreneur and inventor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer (CEO) of Apple Inc.; CEO and majority shareholder of Pixar Animation Studios; a member of The Walt Disney Company’s board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT Inc.

Milton Hershey

After being fired from an apprenticeship with a printer, Hershey started three separate candy-related ventures, and was forced to watch all of them fail. Hershey then founded the Lancaster Caramel Company, and started seeing fantastic results. He eventually founded the Hershey Company and became one of the most well-known names in the industry.
The Hershey Company, commonly called Hershey’s, is the largest chocolate manufacturer in North America.

Akio Morita

Morita co-founded Sony and their first product was a rice cooker, but it burned the rice.
Sony is one of the leading manufacturers of electronic products for the consumer and professional markets.

Bill Gates

Gates started a business called Traf-O-Data that went nowhere and he dropped out of Harvard. His passion for computers and his vision of the opportunities led him to start Microsoft.
Microsoft Corporation develops, manufactures, licenses, supports and sells computer software, consumer electronics and personal computers and services.

Colonel Sanders

The Colonel’s famous secret chicken recipe was rejected over a 1,000 times before a restaurant finally accepted it. He founded KFC when he was 65 years old.
Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is a fast food restaurant chain that specializes in fried chicken. It is the world’s second largest restaurant chain (as measured by sales) after McDonald’s, with almost 20,000 locations globally in 123 countries and territories.

Evan Williams

Williams founded a company called Odeo, a podcasting platform. Soon after, Apple announced that the iTunes store would include a podcasting platform, making Odeo obsolete.
Evan Williams is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur who has founded several Internet companies. Most known for Twitter and Medium.

Fred Smith

While studying at Yale University, Smith presented a business idea to his business management class that received a nearly failing grade. The idea was for a parcel service that could deliver packages overnight. Smith ignored the grade and founded FedEx.
FedEx is known for its overnight shipping service, but also for pioneering a system that could track packages and provide real-time updates on package location (to help in finding lost packages), a feature that has now been implemented by most other carrier services.

Henry Ford

Ford’s first two car companies failed and left him broke. But that didn’t stop him from founding Ford Motor Company and become the first to apply assembly line manufacturing for cars. He became one of the three most famous and richest men in the world.
Henry Ford was an American industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and the sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production.

Mark Cuban

Before making billions selling his company to Yahoo, Cuban failed at a variety of jobs. He failed as a carpenter, as a cook, as a waiter (he couldn’t open a bottle of wine). He says of his failures, “I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how many times you failed. You only have to be right once. I tried to sell powdered milk. I was an idiot lots of times, and I learned from them all.”
Mark Cuban is an American businessman and investor. He is the owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theatres, and Magnolia Pictures, and is the chairman of the HDTV cable network AXS TV. He is also a “shark” investor on the television series, Shark Tank.

Rowland Macy

Between 1843 and 1855, Macy opened four retail dry goods stores that all failed. He learned from those mistakes, and hit it big with his next store in New York City.
Macy’s is a mid-range chain of department stores known for its niche in popular culture and the diversity of its merchandise.

Richard Branson

Even the fifth richest person in the U.K. didn’t get to where he is now without a few failures along the way. Along with his famous Virgin Records and Virgin Airlines, he also developed Virgin Cola and Virgin Vodka. The fact that you don’t recognize them says it all.
Richard Branson is an English business magnate, investor, and philanthropist.

Soichiro Honda

Honda initially applied for a job at Toyota as an engineer, but was turned down. Being jobless, he started making scooters at home, which he sold to neighbors. With the support of his family, he founded Honda.
Soichiro Honda was a Japanese engineer and industrialist. In 1948, he established Honda and oversaw its expansion from a wooden shack manufacturing bicycle motors to a multinational automobile and motorcycle manufacturer.

Thomas Edison

Edison was told as a boy by his teacher that he was too stupid to learn anything and suggested he go into a field that did not require intelligence. He tried more than 9,000 experiments before he created the first successful light bulb.
Thomas Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.

Elon Musk

Musk applied to work at Netscape when he was still enrolled at Stanford. He applied but never heard back. Then he actually went to Netscape’s offices with resume in hand and waited in the lobby for hours. He eventually got embarrassed and walked out.
Elon Musk is a South African-born Canadian-American business magnate, engineer and inventor.
He is the founder, CEO and CTO of SpaceX; co-founder, CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors; co-founder and chairman of SolarCity, co-chairman of OpenAI; co-founder of Zip2; and co-founder of PayPal.

Jim Carrey

Carrey grew up in a lower-income family with a father who struggled to keep jobs. They were so poor that he had to drop out of high school at the age of 15 and get a job as a janitor just to help support the family. On his first comic stand-up at a club called Yuk Yuk’s in Toronto, he was booed off stage. Later, when he auditioned for Saturday Night Live for the 1980-81 season, he failed to land the part.
Jim Carrey is a Canadian American actor, comedian, impressionist, screenwriter, and producer. He is known for his highly energetic slapstick performances.

Katy Perry

After being dropped from three labels, you would think that Perry would have given up. She didn’t. She continued to pursue her career, working odd jobs and doing back-up vocals until she was signed to the newly-formed Capitol Music Group in 2006. It was there that she worked on her first huge hit single, I Kissed a Girl, which started her career as a commercial success.
Katy Perry, is an American singer, songwriter, and actress.

J.K. Rowling

Rowling was jobless, divorced, penniless, and with a dependent child. She suffered through bouts of depression, eventually signing up for government-assisted welfare. It was a difficult time in her life, but she pushed through the failures.
Joanne “Jo” Rowling, OBE, FRSL, pen names J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, is a British novelist, screenwriter and film producer best known as the author of the Harry Potter fantasy series

Stephen King

King’s first novel, Carrie, was rejected 30 times before it was published. Not only that, but King actually threw the manuscript into the garbage, only later to be retrieved by his wife who wildly believed in his dream of becoming a published author.
Stephen King is an American author of contemporary horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy.

James Dyson

It took Dyson 5,126 failures to finally get his idea right to use the concept of cyclonic separation to create the world’s first bagless vacuum cleaner. He was faced with more resistance when no distributor in the UK would take on the revolutionary product.
Sir James Dyson OM CBE FRS FREng (born 2 May 1947) is a British inventor, industrial designer and founder of the Dyson company.

Zach Anner

If at Birth You Don’t Succeed (also the title of his book).
Zach Anner is an Austin, Texas-based comedian, actor and writer with cerebral palsy who gained world-wide attention with the submission of a video to Oprah Winfrey’s “Search for the Next TV Star” competition. He won his own TV show on OWN through Oprah’s Your OWN Show: Oprah’s Search for the Next TV Star. His wheelchair travel show, Rollin’ With Zach, premiered December 12, 2011.

Gary Vaynerchuk aka Garyvee

His failures other than spreading himself too thin are not to heavily publicized(from what I could find) but he does prove if you want you have to work for it.
Gary Vaynerchuk is an entrepreneur, investor, author, public speaker, internet personality and founder of VaynerMedia which is a brand consulting agency with a focus on social media. The company works with a wide range of clients including both personal and consumer brands as well as startups.

Anvil

Anvil has been cited as having influenced many notable heavy metal groups, including Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax and Metallica without ever becoming a mainstream success themselves. Steve “Lips” Kudlow (vocals, guitar), has worked as a truck driver for Children’s Choice Catering, a business dedicated to delivering food to schools and institutions. However, despite it being often physically demanding and ‘backbreaking’ work, he has spoken positively of his job and lifestyle, saying “I’ve raised a family, I own a home, I’ve lead a great, “normal” life, which is something that you just can’t do if you’re a monster star your entire life. Working the other jobs allowed me to go out and play across the world and do whatever I like, but when I come home, I get to be normal again.”

Anvil are a Canadian heavy metal band from Toronto, Ontario, formed in 1978. The band consists of Steve “Lips” Kudlow (vocals, guitar), Robb Reiner (drums). To date, the band has released fifteen studio albums.
If able, before you even knew the concept of failure you tried and tried and tried until you finally began to walk. That lead to trying to riding a bike or chewing bubblegum and for some of those more talented people out there, walking and chewing bubblegum at the same time.
Failure, most often times is necessary for the learning process and sometimes it is just a stupid speed bump where the city should have never put one.

There is no promise of success.

There are more people who have failed than those who will ever find success, and who knows how half-assed their attempts were.
But there is an astronomical amount of people who have never tried.

Are you one of them?