In Praise of Failure #1 - J.K.Rowling
When gut-wrenching failure shakes every bone in your body; do you give up or do you double down?
“I have not failed; I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison
I have been speaking to quite a few founders recently, which I enjoy; they are optimists, they want to make a positive impact, they are driven, and they are passionate.
However I also noticed the stress, the anxiety and the ton of bricks they carry on their shoulders.
Let's face it. Starting a business is hard. Getting a business off the ground is hard.
It's easy for me to be all philosophical and say “it's okay, your time will come.”
But the hard realities of business are daunting - how do I find my first customer to get my business going? What if I run out of cash? How do I find time to juggle my business with my family time or with my day job?
These struggles have real implications on a founder’s physical, mental and financial health. Running a business is like running a marathon; it will be painful; it will be hard and it will test every muscle and bone in your body. As the adage goes, ‘every overnight success is actually decades in the making’.
Does it help to know that other founders go through similar challenges, a.k.a. misery has company? Maybe. It might help learning about businesses that collapsed due to the most basic mistakes.
The best part about studying business is that there is an abundance of inspiring stories. I picked out three stories, where founders faced one adversity after another while pursuing their passion, and rose from rock-bottom to conquer their world.
These stories are fascinating, but the way they describe their own struggles and what they learnt from them is just as powerful.
I have broken down these into a three part series, covering the struggles of J.K.Rowling, Sir James Dyson and Walt Disney.
J.K.Rowling
“Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing.” — J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling, the author of the immensely popular Harry Potter series, faced numerous struggles before achieving success. In her early twenties, Rowling went through a divorce, became a single mother, and found herself living on welfare. She paid her rent by working at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.
Writing became a diversion. A creative detour from her misfortunes.
She encountered testimonies of men and women from totalitarian regimes who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. They were eventually found, tortured, kidnapped or executed.
She saw evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. She began to have nightmares about some of the horrible things she saw, heard, and read.
Yet, she also learnt about human goodness. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security were assured, joined together in huge numbers to save people they did not know, and would never meet.
She got the idea for ‘Harry Potter’ while delayed on a train travelling from Manchester to London. Once the first three chapters were completed, Rowling enthusiastically submitted it to several publishers. Twelve rejected it. The thirteenth gave her the thumbs up.
In 1997, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone hit the shelves and within weeks exploded into a global sensation. In less than ten years from the publishing of her first novel, Rowling had sold more than 500 million books and amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune; becoming the most successful literary author of all time.
In 2008, Rowling delivered a moving, vulnerable speech when she spoke to the graduating class at Harvard University. She shared deep insights form the failures in her early adult life. Abridged excerpts below (emphasis added).
“So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into 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 arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.”
Her story is moving. Despite being afraid of failure, she found herself at rock bottom. And at rock bottom, she saw in herself a burning desire. She discovered the strength and the will to keep pursuing her one true passion; writing stories.
Three key takeaways stayed with me after hearing her story. One, reflecting on failure is a great way to discover truths about yourself. Two, taking punches to your chin makes you realise your inherent superpower of ‘survival’. And three, you emerge stronger when you go through these setbacks.
Continue reading Part #2 - Sir James Dyson
I will be releasing #3 shortly, stay tuned!
Meanwhile, what are your failure-to-success stories? I would love to hear them, because shared learning is the fun part about this exploration.