“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
Winston Churchill
People who triumph over failure are the stuff of legends. Seemingly they possess a recipe: “If you do as I do then good things will be yours!”
The world’s first billionaire author, J K Rowling is truly inspirational,
“[She] saw herself as a failure at this time. She was jobless, divorced, penniless, and with a dependent child. She suffered through bouts of depression, eventually signing up for government-assisted welfare. It was a difficult time in her life, but she pushed through the failures.
In 1995 all 12 major publishers rejected the Harry Potter script.”1
Her failures are matched by Thomas Edison who described his failures as a learning experience,
“….having gone through over 9,000 failed attempts, Edison simply stated “Why would I feel like a failure? And why would I ever give up? I now know definitely over 9,000 ways an electric lightbulb will not work. Success is almost in my grasp.”2
Rowling and Edison are examples of the success myth. Once the recipe is learned then everything flows towards yet more success. Enter Isaac Newton,
“…evidence that before that [South Sea] mania, he was a shrewd and successful investor….That a person of such ability, knowledge and connections could lose his head in a mania is therefore frequently cited as an example of the difficulty of recognizing bubbles.”3
Newton was a scientific genius and important in Britain’s financial world at the beginning of the 18th century. Arrogance and greed destroyed his critical faculties. He became a gambler, counting his winnings before the race had begun. The 1720 South Sea Bubble is one of the world’s most famous scams and emptied Newton’s bank account. Like all financial bubbles, it relied on gullible people believing in an endless stream of money waiting to pour into their wallet,
“….the company introduced several other reckless, legally questionable methods, including lending people its own money so they would buy shares. In terms of the stock market, this created the illusion that share demand was high, which inflated the value.”4
Albert Einstein wasn’t greedy but was arrogant. He was a genius and won the Nobel Prize in 1921. His place in intellectual history is universally accepted,
“….the word Einstein [is] broadly synonymous with genius.”5
After early groundbreaking successes, his life ended after spending 30 years in an intellectual cul de sac.6 He refused to accept he’d set himself an impossible task,
“….[he]coined the term “Unified Field Theory,” which describes any attempt to unify the fundamental forces of physics between elementary particles into a single theoretical framework.” 7
J K Rowling and Thomas Edison obsessively believed in themselves. Despite gruelling failures, they persisted and triumphed. Their early failures hardened them to the realities of life and made them realistic.
Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were geniuses who had early success. When they began new activities they assumed they would have yet more success. They didn’t subject these new activities to continuing analysis and trusted their genius too much.
The last word goes to ancient philosophers explaining the dangers of hubris. Their insight is expressed in two words – Know yourself!
“…the Lydian king Croesus [was] captured in battle by Cyrus, and lament[ed] his failure to follow the advice of the oracle at Delphi, who had told him that he must know himself in order to be happy. In attempting to wage war against Cyrus, he had overestimated his own ability, and his defeat [was] therefore a just reward for his ignorance of himself.”8
Notes
1 12 Famous People Who Failed Before Succeeding | Wanderlust Worker
2 loc.cit.
4 What Was The South Sea Bubble & Why Did It Burst? | HistoryExtra
6 Albert Einstein: What Is Unified Field Theory? (thoughtco.com) I don’t understand but I thought that you might like to have a look
7 loc.cit
8 Know thyself – Wikipedia The battle Cyrus was in 547 BC
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