Fail To Succeed: 7 Iconic Successes Spawned From Failure [Chart]

I thought I’d kick the Bit Rebels day off today with a little motivation and inspiration. We’ve all heard the phrase that we have to “fail to succeed,” but do you really know what that means? It’s actually not as bad as it sounds. It simply means we have to change our perspective about failure. Let me give you an example. Like all entrepreneurs, we here at Bit Rebels have days when we feel we can take on the whole world and win, and other days when we just want to crawl under the covers and go back to sleep.

Just the other day, Richard and I were talking about how we’ve thought of and implemented several dozen ideas over the past three years which were all intended to help Bit Rebels grow. Out of all those ideas so far, we can point to 2 or 3 that were really, really good. The rest were okay, but those few really stand out from the rest and gave us the boost we needed. Were the other ideas failures? Of course not. Every single one makes up an integral part of this journey. If you get hung up on each idea that doesn’t pan out the way you thought it would, you are going to have a painful ride while trying to reach your goals. Instead, embrace those ideas because you have to try a lot of them to find the good ones. In other words, we have to fail to succeed. It’s kind of like dating – You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince.

So with that being said, if you can somehow train your brain to embrace the failures and realize it doesn’t mean YOU are a failure, it just means that particular idea didn’t work like you thought it would (it took me over a decade to do this) – You will find the ride to your destination is much smoother and more joyful. Just realize it’s all part of the journey. You have to fail to succeed, and if you aren’t doing that, you might have some room to reach for bigger goals.

The little chart below called “Famous Failures” is another oldie but goodie that’s been floating around the web for a while. I found traces of it from all the way back in 2007, and I’m still not sure who to credit for creating it. Like most timeless pieces like this, it gets popular, then it dies down, then it gets popular again, then it dies down, but it never gets old. This is making the rounds once again, and this time, I wanted to share it with you. I also put a quote below from J.K. Rowling. Her story is truly inspiring, and if you don’t know it, I encourage you to look it up and read it. Of course, she was the first person to become a U.S. dollar billionaire by writing books.

All of these famous people understood the “fail to succeed” concept. I sure wish I could sit down and talk to a couple of them to hear their stories firsthand and learn from what they struggled with internally along the way. If you’d like to read more about this, you can check out another article I wrote on the same topic about a year ago called Fail Your Way To Success: 5 Inspiring Examples. Harrison Ford and Stephen King are in that one, and again, they have great stories! You can also check out 50 Famous Fails.