It was late in the year 1879. A young man and his team huddled in a laboratory which they had spent nearly two years experimenting on the same invention. The leader of the team may have been thought of as a failure compared to many others in his day. Concerning education, other than being mostly self-taught, he only had three formal years of school as a child and some classes in chemistry at New York City’s Cooper Union. As a child, he was hyperactive, prone to distraction, and deemed difficult to be taught. One of his teachers said he was “too stupid to learn anything.”
In the workforce, he was fired from his first two jobs for being “non-productive”. As an inventor, he had a string of products that cost much precious time and money to create but were flops. Among these were the automatic vote recorder, the electric pen, the home projecting kinetoscope, and ore mills and separators. When asked by a reporter midway through this present development process as to what he received from the multiple failed attempts he replied, “Results! Why, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work!”
The invention the team pursued also had been worked on by various scientists for over 40 years up to this point. Scientists knew that electric light was possible with an arc lamp. But all attempts proved to have extremely short lifespans or were too expensive to produce. In October 1879, the boy who was branded a failure took a carbonized filament of uncoated cotton thread and created a light bulb that lasted 14 ½ hours. Early the next year, Thomas Edison created a filament from bamboo fiber that gave Edison lamps a life of up to 1,200 hours. Patent number 223,898 would forever change what we mean when we say, “turn the light on.”
History is full of people who have failed and have started over again. Abraham Lincoln lost every political race he ran with the exception of when he was elected president. Imagine what would have happened if he would have quit prior to the last election. Henry Ford went bankrupt five times before he built the Model T. What would have happened if he hung it up after the fifth bankruptcy? Babe Ruth amassed hundreds more strikeouts than he did home runs in his career. Do we look at his career as a failure because of this? Winston Churchill was kicked out of his own political party and considered a pariah before he was the prime minister who lead England through World War II. He was the only sound voice that kept the people of Britain inspired to continue to fight in the face of Nazi oppression. Michael Jordan missed over 9,000 shots and lost 300 games in his career. Yet many consider him one of the greatest to play the game.
Failure can be our best teacher, if we let it. We must face the reality and reasons behind our failure. Athletes who are at the top of their game have coaches who help them identify where their failures are and make then make changes to address those. Thomas Edison kept thousands of detailed records of his experiments and would often go back to them to see what things did not work. This gives you a closer path to what will work.
Another thing to consider is what we may think of success may actually be failure in other areas. Consider the successful businessman who has sacrificed his family on the altar of accomplishment. Another example is Kenneth Lay. He ran the once successful company Enron but proved to be without a moral compass and was convicted on six counts of fraud. Sometimes success may seem wonderful on the outside but is built upon internal failure which we cannot see.
A problem we have with failure is that we hang a label around the neck of those who have failed as failures. Zig Ziglar reminds us that, “Failure is an event, not a person.” When we fail, some of us tend to wallow in self-pity than rise up and start again. When we see others who we think are failures, some of us tend to judge those folks form our own self-righteous position. Perhaps we do this to make ourselves feel better and ignore our own shortcomings. But allowing ourselves to be a judger, jury, and executioner of another’s worth and character places us in a position that no human is qualified to perform.
Keeping failures as events in our lives and recognizing failure as an event in the lives of others is a key step. Next we assess what happened and adjust as needed. Finally, rising from the dirt and trying again is the only way true success occurs. After all, the expert, is only the person who has failed a lot and yet just continued to try and endure. The first step on the journey to success is to take the first step for you will always fail at what you do not try.