Take action toward your success
| Everybody enjoys a success story. Vicariously living out our fantasies through those who achieved success gives us hope it will happen to us. But, listening to these stories doesn’t do us any favors because those tales aren’t the whole picture: the struggles, the tough breaks, the defeats that set the stage for the eventual big win.The fact is, while there are an infinite number of ways that successful entrepreneurs make their money, there’s only one thing they all have in common: failure.There’s no shortage of examples of great successes who had to struggle before they became the winners we now know them as. Oscar-winner Steven Spielberg was rejected from U.S.C film school. Thomas Edison went through thousands of prototypes before perfecting his light bulb. “Colonel” Harland Sanders didn’t hit it big with KFC until he was 68 years old.Even Bill Gates, maybe the most successful businessman in history, didn’t rocket straight to the top with Microsoft. It’s not a well-known fact that his first company, called Traf-O-Data, was an early attempt at using computerized data to improve traffic surveys for municipal governments. Gates and his partners spent countless hours refining their hardware and working out all the details to make the business work. But, when it came time to wow the county officials who would be their customers, the machine was a bust.Gates and his number two, Paul Allen, were certainly discouraged but ended up being better suited for their real business revolution that was yet to come. To hear Allen tell the story: “even though Traf-O-Data wasn’t a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft’s first product a couple of years later. We taught ourselves to simulate how microprocessors work using DEC computers, so we could develop software even before our machine was built.” |
