Twelve Creatives Who Overcame Failure

Success comes with failure. It’s an inevitable part of the process. And while many see it as a negative, failure affords us the opportunity to learn and grow from our missteps. There are numerous benefits of failing as a learning experience, throughout your career and life in general.  Failure –

• offers a representation of what can be improved upon.
• allows us to reflect and re-adjust our strategy to better meet our goals.
• forces us to be vulnerable to criticism and learn lessons about ourselves and communicating with others.
• helps us build resilience.
• helps us see the value in all our feats.

The benefits of failing go on and on. In fact, so many successful creatives have faced hardships and failures on their journey to success and fame that we can learn from. Did you know that Oprah grew up in extreme poverty and was fired from her job at Baltimore’s WJZ? We all know how her story ends: she persisted and went on to create the highest-ranked talk show in Chicago. How about Walt Disney? The successful entrepreneur was fired from his first job, declared bankruptcy, and was rejected over 300 times for his Disneyland concept. Yet that didn’t stop him.

J.K. Rowling’s “Failure”

Novelist J.K. Rowling faced similar hardships before striking it big. She was rejected from 12 major publishing houses for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. A quote from Rowling herself sums it up perfectly, “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”

As you can see, these inspiring creatives didn’t give up, even when faced with extremely difficult obstacles that life threw at them. Invaluable created a neat infographic that details more famous people whose lives were rife with difficulties and failures before they saw great success. Gain inspiration from their stories, whatever your venture may be.