Did You Know These Super Successful People Were Once Considered As Failures?

Walt Disney was told he lacked creativity

One of the most creative geniuses of the 20th century was once fired from a newspaper because he was told that he was not creative enough. Disney formed his first animation company, which was called Laugh-O-Gram Films. He raised $15,000 for the company but eventually was forced to close Laugh-O-Gram, following the close of an important distributor partner. 

Desperate and out of money, Disney found his way to Hollywood and faced even more criticism and failure until finally, his first few classic films started to skyrocket in popularity.

Steve Jobs was fired from his own company

Steve Jobs is an impressive entrepreneur because of his boundless innovations, but also because of his emphatic comeback from an almost irrecoverable failure. Jobs found success in his 20s when Apple became a massive empire, but when he was 30, Apple’s board of directors decided to fire him. 

Undaunted by the failure, Jobs founded a new company, NeXT, which was eventually acquired by Apple. Once back at Apple, Jobs proved his capacity for greatness by reinventing the company’s image and taking the Apple brand to new heights.

Milton Hershey started three candy companies before Hershey’s

Everyone knows Hershey’s chocolate, but when Milton Hershey first started his candy production career, he was a nobody. After being fired from an apprenticeship with a printer, Hershey started three separate candy-related ventures and was forced to watch all of them fail. 

In one last attempt, Hershey founded the Lancaster Caramel Company and started seeing enormous results. Believing in his vision for milk chocolate for the masses, he eventually founded the Hershey Company and became one of the most well-known names in the industry.

These inspirational stories act as a motivation for all of those who have faced failure and fear to start off again. At the moment, some failure might seem like the end of the road, but remember, there are countless successful men and women in the world today who are only enjoying success because they decided to push past the inevitable bleakness of failure. 

ALSO READ: Failing well: how to assess, move on and succeed after failures