Some of the most successful and well known people have been through a lot of failure. You’ll read articles on how sometimes you need to fail before you become very successful and that’s exactly what they did. In the article “Failure is Feedback” by Victor Balasa, he writes about people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and how they started from the bottom, and made it all the way to the top. They both had failed so many times in business and life that their drive to succeed was enormous. Steve Jobs wasted millions of dollars before Apple became what it has in the past fifteen years, and now he could be looked at as one of the most influential business makers ever (Balasa 1). Bill gates has a very similar story.
His first company ever was a complete bust. During the demo of the machine the company was about, the machine didn’t even start, and this ended up being a huge waste of money (Balasa 1). Although both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates failed early in their careers, it prepared them for what the business world was like, and taught them many lessons that contributed to their successes down the road. In an interview with Steve Jobs, one of the most important lines ever said by him was, “You’ve got to be willing to fail. You’ve got to be willing to crash and burn. With people on the phone, with starting a company, with whatever...If you’re afraid of failing you won’t get very far” (Steve Jobs on Failure). This goes back to everyone encounters failure, but it is something that you can’t be afraid of. Sometimes in life you need to take risks to experience greatness. Another great example of this is Michael Jordan. Arguably one the best basketball players of all time, in high school he was cut from the team because his coach didn’t think he had enough skill. That is a devastating failure but he used that as motivation. Not only did he become one of the greatest basketball players ever, but he even has his own line of sneakers, and is a huge part of the Hanes company.
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Works Cited
Balasa, Victor. “Failure is Feedback: How 5 billionares
had to fail to succeed.” Hongkiat. Web. 28 Sept 2016.
“Steve Jobs on Failure.” Youtube. Youtube. 31 Oct 2011.
Web. 02 Oct 2016.