– Thomas Edison
Many entrepreneurs are deeply inspired people, risktakers driven by vision and ambition to bring something new into the world. Often, the source of their inspiration is Spirit itself. When such is the case, they’re literally embodiments of Spirit and money because Spirit has given them ideas for products and/or services that make the world a better place. Bringing such products and/or services into the world can make them a tremendous amount of money in the process.
To become successful as an entrepreneur requires access to a big idea; passionate belief in that idea; boundless optimism; skills of persuasion that attract capital to fund the idea, and gain the support of people to help make the idea a reality; persistence until the idea becomes successful; and the rare ability to see what others perceive as failure as nothing more than opportunities to improve their idea or themselves.
Many entrepreneurs fail in their efforts to turn ideas into realities, because they lack some of these attributes above, sometimes because they focus more on the money they’ll make from their venture instead of manifesting the venture to make the world a better place. If you focus on the money you’re going to make from your better mousetrap, rather than on helping people rid themselves of mice, you may wind up broke with a lot of credit card bills and a lot of unused mousetraps.
Entrepreneurs Who Overcame Failure
My favorite example of an entrepreneur who wouldn’t take failure as an answer is Sir Richard Branson, honored in 2000 for his “services to entrepreneurship.” He wasn’t knighted when he had failures with Virgin Cola, Virgin Clothes, Virgin Money, Virgin Vie, Virgin Vision, Virgin Vodka, Virgin Wine, Virgin Jeans, Virgin Brides, Virgin Cosmetics and Virgin Cars, but he refused to accept failure as permanent.
A high school dropout, the dyslexic student was told by the headmaster on his last day that he’d either end up in prison or as a millionaire. He was wrong: he became a billionaire – five times over.
At 16, he launched a magazine called “Student” to be the voice of his generation, but when it was failing because of poor cash flow, he didn’t quit, but instead launched a discount mail-order record business to fund it. That morphed into the enormously successful Virgin Records.
At 33, Branson tried to launch Virgin Atlantic Airlines, but it literally almost never got off the ground, as its test flight resulted in extensive engine damage when a flock of birds flew into it. Did he see this as a sign from the Universe that his idea was a bad one? Hardly. He pulled money from other ventures to fund it, and in time, it became a huge hit.
From Welfare to Harry Potter
J.K. Rowling was a single mother, living on British welfare when she wrote “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” the first in the sevenpart series that became the best-selling fiction franchise in history. The book came to her fully formed while on a delayed train from Manchester to London. She wrote the concept for the book on a napkin.
The self-described “biggest failure,” Rowling told 2008 graduating students at Harvard, that:
Failure meant a stripping away of the essential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and I began to direct all my energies to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive... and so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
After the first novel was rejected 12 times, a small publisher took it on and gave her a small advance. The books have sold more than 400 million copies throughout the world, enabling their author to become a billionaire.
These examples prove the old maxim: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
