13 Famous People Who Turned Failure Into Success

11. Orville and Wilbur Wright
After several years of building kites and gliders (and numerous crashes), the brothers changed the world on Dec 17, 1903 when they broke the bounds of gravity and flew a manned heavier-than-air machine. And this was achieved by two men with no formal engineering training. The two brothers were originally inspired by a toy helicopter that their father brought home and flew around the room.

Orville took his father on what was his dad’s one and only flight. As Orville gained elevation, his dad enthusiastically yelled out… “Higher Orville, higher!”

When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, inside his spacesuit pocket was a piece of fabric from the wing of the original Wright Flyer.

12. Soichiro Honda
Honda started a machine shop in 1937 to produce piston rings for Toyota, where he labored long hours and even slept in the workshop. To keep things going, he pawned his wife’s jewelry. Unfortunately, his product failed to meet Toyota’s quality inspection standards and was rejected. Rather than give up, he went back to school and kept working until winning a contract with Toyota two years later.

As steel was not readily available during the war, he collected surplus gasoline cans discarded by US fighters, calling them “Gifts from President Truman,” which he used as raw materials for manufacturing. Honda endured his factory being devastated by a bomb and then later being destroyed by an earthquake.

The gasoline shortage after the war resulted in people walking or riding bicycles, so Honda started modifying bicyles by attaching a small bicycle engines. Honda Motor Company ‘s revenue was $119 Billion in 2014.

13. Henry Ford
The first automobile Ford designed was the Quadricycle, which wasn’t fit for mass production. Then Ford founded the Detroit Automotive Company, which failed because Ford’s perfectionism got the better of him and he couldn’t stop tinkering. Ford had little to show for his work 18 months into the effort, and the company was disbanded.

Ford eventually started Ford Motor Company and built the Model A. The first batch had so many problems that Ford had to send mechanics throughout the country to fix the cars. The good news, the mechanics came back with ideas to improve the cars, and that knowledge went into correcting the future builds. “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

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Lastly, I would like to share with you one of my favourite quotes from Napolean Hill regarding failure:

“Before success comes in any man’s life, he is sure to meet with much temporary defeat, and, perhaps, some failure. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to quit. That is exactly what the majority of men do. More than five hundred of the most successful men this country has ever known told the author their greatest success came just one step beyond the point at which defeat had overtaken them.”
― Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich