An exercise in getting started
Give yourselfPermission to Fail
Fear of failing is what stops most people from starting. You cannot get good at something you never begin, so the freeze guarantees the outcome it was trying to avoid.
This is the way out that has worked in classrooms and lecture halls: put the permission in writing, sign it in your own hand, and hang it where you will see it on the days you are stuck.
Famous Failures
They kept going anyway.
Every person here is someone you already know made it. What you probably do not know is the stretch before that — the rejections, the firings, the years of nothing working. None of them could see the ending from inside it either. Each failure below carries its own source, because the real record is more useful than the myths that get passed around. See which ones we checked
Sixto Rodriguez
Singer-songwriter
Dropped by his label, working demolition — and a star in countries he had never visited.
2 documented failures
Photo by Kim Metso, 2013. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
John Cassavetes
Filmmaker
Scrapped his own first film after the audience walked out.
2 documented failures
Stephen Sondheim
Composer-lyricist
Closed after sixteen performances in 1981. In 2024 it won the Tony for Best Revival.
3 documented failures
Photo by Bernard Gotfryd, 1972. Library of Congress.
Theodor Seuss Geisel
Children's author
Rejected somewhere between 20 and 43 times. He never gave a consistent count.
2 documented failures
Photo by Al Ravenna, 1957. New York World-Telegram and the Sun, Library of Congress.
Katalin Karikó
Biochemistry
Demoted, defunded, pushed out after 24 years. Kept running the experiment.
3 documented failures
US Embassy Sweden, 2023. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Peter Higgs
Theoretical physics
The paper was rejected. Revising it is where the boson came from.
1 documented failure
Bengt Nyman. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Sir James Dyson
Industrial design
5,127 prototypes. That is one method, run five thousand times.
1 documented failure
The Royal Society. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Abraham Lincoln
Law and politics
The famous list of his failures is mostly invented. The real record is better.
11 documented failures
Michael Jordan
Basketball
The most repeated failure story in the world is wrong in its central word.
2 documented failures
Niki Lauda
Formula One driver
Given the last rites in hospital. Back in a racing car six weeks later.
2 documented failures
Leonard Cohen
Songwriter and poet
His own label refused to release the album with Hallelujah on it.
3 documented failures
Photo by Rama. CC BY-SA 2.0 fr, via Wikimedia Commons.
Charley Pride
Country singer
He failed at his first career in front of scouts, then signed a record deal at thirty-one.
2 documented failures
Brian Wilson
Composer and producer
He abandoned the album halfway. He finished it thirty-seven years later.
3 documented failures
Photo by Takahiro Kyono, 2012. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Bill Withers
Soul singer-songwriter
He was thirty-one, making lavatories for aeroplanes, and kept the factory job mindset for years.
1 documented failure
Photo by onetwothreefourfive, 2015. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Oprah Winfrey
Broadcaster
Not fired. Moved to reading early-morning headline cut-ins in the same building — which was worse.
2 documented failures
Sidney Poitier
Actor
Thrown out of his first audition by the collar. He came back and offered to be the janitor.
3 documented failures
Laurence Olivier
Stage actor
He developed stage fright at fifty-seven and kept walking on stage anyway, terrified, for years.
2 documented failures
Photo by Allan Warren. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Buster Keaton
Filmmaker and comedian
He signed the contract everyone warned him against, lost his films, and came back as an anonymous gag writer.
3 documented failures
Ann Dowd
Character actress
Before Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid's Tale: the best reviews of her life, a hundred dollars a day, and a distributor that would not spend a cent. She put it on a credit card and did not get the nomination.
3 documented failures
Photo by Peabody Awards. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Bob Odenkirk
Comedian and actor
A decade of pilots that never aired and two films critics hated. He was forty-six when the three-episode part turned up.
3 documented failures
Photo by Kevin Paul. CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Ke Huy Quan
Actor
He lost his health insurance because nobody would hire him — after filming the picture that won him an Oscar.
3 documented failures
Peter Dinklage
Actor
He turned down the elf and leprechaun parts that paid, and spent six years in data entry instead.
3 documented failures
Photo by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Mara Wilson
Writer, former child actor
One of the most recognisable children in the world, and then the call-backs stopped. She became a writer, which is the point.
3 documented failures
Photo by Super Festivals. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Jeff Cohen
Entertainment lawyer, former child actor
He was Chunk in The Goonies. He aged out of acting at sixteen, and is now the lawyer other former child actors hire.
1 documented failure
CelebHeights.com. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Brian Chesky
Airbnb co-founder
The Airbnb co-founder published a letter saying his own previous statement had not reflected his true feelings, and that they had dropped the ball.
3 documented failures
Photo by Celeste Sloman. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Nolan Bushnell
Games and entertainment
He invented the video game industry, was removed from it, and then failed at almost everything else for forty years.
3 documented failures
Photo by Tech Cocktail. CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Steve Jobs
Product and company building
Pushed out of the company he founded, at thirty. It took twelve years and two more near-failures to get back.
8 documented failures
Photo: Matthew Yohe, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.
Walt Disney
Animation studio founder
His first studio went bankrupt. Then his distributor took his most popular character and most of his animators.
5 documented failures
Sara Blakely
Consumer products founder
She bombed the law entrance exam twice, was turned down for a Goofy costume, and sold fax machines for seven years.
5 documented failures
Photo: David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 3.0.
Arianna Huffington
Publishing and media
Her second book was turned down by more than thirty publishers. She got a bank loan to keep going and was rejected a dozen more times.
4 documented failures
Photo: David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 3.0.
J.K. Rowling
Novelist
Turned down by more or less every major publisher in Britain, over about a year, while on state benefits.
4 documented failures
Photo: Daniel Ogren, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0.
Agatha Christie
Novelist
Told her voice would never be strong enough for opera. Her first novel was never published at all.
5 documented failures
George Orwell
Novelist and essayist
T. S. Eliot rejected him twice, twelve years apart. The second book was Animal Farm.
9 documented failures
Claude Monet
Painter
Rejected by the Salon in three years out of four, evicted for unpaid rent, and his paintings seized by creditors.
7 documented failures
Yayoi Kusama
Artist
Turned up uninvited at the Venice Biennale in 1966 and had her sale stopped by the organisers. Represented Japan there twenty-seven years later.
7 documented failures
Photo: George Quasha, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 3.0.
Grandma Moses
Painter
Her paintings sat unsold in a chemist's window for years. She was seventy-eight.
6 documented failures
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
Trade unionism and politics
He lost three presidential elections in a row before winning the fourth.
4 documented failures
Photo: Ricardo Stuckert / Agência Brasil, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 3.0 Brazil.
Kim Dae-jung
Politics
Three lost presidential elections, a kidnapping, and a death sentence — then the presidency and a Nobel Prize.
3 documented failures
Photo: EC — Audiovisual Service, © European Union, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 4.0.
Winston Churchill
Politics
He lost his seat twice, was blamed for a military catastrophe, and spent the 1930s written off entirely.
9 documented failures
Ulysses S. Grant
Soldiering and politics
He sold firewood on street corners in worn-out clothes, and pawned his watch two days before Christmas.
7 documented failures
Harrison Ford
Actor
A studio executive told him he would never make it. He kept acting anyway, and for most of the next decade carpentry paid the bills.
3 documented failures
Photo: Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.
Rodney Dangerfield
Comedian
He quit comedy for about a decade to sell aluminium siding, then came back in his forties under a different name.
4 documented failures
Vera Wang
Fashion design
She missed the Olympic team, was passed over for the top job at Vogue, and had no label of her own until she was forty.
5 documented failures
Photo: Christopher Peterson, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0.
Kurt Warner
American football
Undrafted, cut, and stocking supermarket shelves at five dollars fifty an hour. Five years later he was the league's most valuable player.
6 documented failures
Morgan Freeman
Actor
He was thirty-nine when his television job was cancelled and he felt he was back at square one.
3 documented failures
Photo: David Sifry, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0.
Albert Einstein
Theoretical physics
He could not get an academic job for two years, and wrote the papers that changed physics as a patent clerk.
8 documented failures
Barry Marshall
Medicine
Nobody believed ulcers were an infection, so he drank the bacteria himself.
4 documented failures
George Washington
Soldiering
He surrendered on his first independent command, and lost more battles than he won.
7 documented failures
Audie Murphy
Soldiering
Turned away by the Marines for being too short, then by the paratroopers, then nearly sent to cookery school.
6 documented failures
Horatio Nelson
Naval command
He lost the use of an eye, then an arm, then wrote that he was a burden to his friends and useless to his country.
5 documented failures
Stephen King
Novelist
By fourteen the nail on his wall would not hold the rejection slips. He replaced it with a spike.
7 documented failures
Photo: Kevin Payravi / WikiPortraits, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Madeleine L'Engle
Novelist
On her fortieth birthday another rejection arrived. She covered her typewriter and swore she was done.
The first edition jacket, 1962. No freely licensed photograph of L'Engle exists — every portrait of her online is still in copyright.
6 documented failures
Toni Morrison
Novelist
Her first novel was printed in two thousand copies and was out of print within four years.
8 documented failures
King Camp Gillette
Invention and manufacturing
Metallurgists at MIT told him it could not be done. He spent six more years failing at it.
6 documented failures
Garrett Morgan
Invention
He hired a white actor to pose as the inventor, then demonstrated his own breathing hood under an assumed name.
7 documented failures
Les Paul
Music and invention
Gibson called him the kid with the broomstick with the pickups on it.
6 documented failures
George Washington Carver
Agricultural science
A college accepted him by post and refused him at the door when they saw he was Black.
5 documented failures
Steve Wozniak
Computer engineering
He offered the design to his own employer first. They did not want it.
5 documented failures
Photo: Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.
Jack Ma
Technology and commerce
He scored one point out of a hundred and twenty in the maths paper, and sat the exam three times.
4 documented failures
Photo: UNclimatechange, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0.
Soichiro Honda
Engineering and manufacturing
He sent Toyota fifty piston rings. Three passed inspection.
Honda as a young riding mechanic, 1934, two years before his crash at the Tamagawa Speedway. No free portrait of him in later life exists.
8 documented failures
Akio Morita
Consumer electronics
Their first tape recorder weighed thirty-five kilograms, cost a hundred and sixty thousand yen, and in its first several months sold one.
6 documented failures
Photo: 626startouch, 1977, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Wright brothers
Aeronautics
Wilbur told Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. It took them two.
6 documented failures
Charles M. Schulz
Cartooning
His own school yearbook would not print his drawings. He called it his first major rejection.
6 documented failures
Louisa May Alcott
Novelist
Her publisher told her to stick to teaching, because she could not write. She wrote it down in her journal.
6 documented failures
Samuel Beckett
Novelist and dramatist
Kept a handwritten list of the publishers who turned him down. Twelve names, one added later in a different pencil.
Photographed in 1977, forty years after the notebook.
3 documented failures
Susan Lucci
Actor
Lost the same award eighteen times, in public, on live television, over twenty-one years.
Ten years after the streak ended.
3 documented failures
Randy Newman
Composer and songwriter
Fifteen Academy Award nominations, fifteen losses. He opened his acceptance speech with “I don’t want your pity.”
1975, seven years before the first of fifteen losses.
2 documented failures
Dan Jansen
Speed skating
The best sprint skater in the world lost seven straight Olympic races over ten years before winning the last one he ever skated.
Heerenveen, February 1985 — three years before Calgary, and inside the failure years.
5 documented failures
Tenzing Norgay
Mountaineering
Turned down for Everest in 1933, then went back six times without reaching the top.
The statue at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, Darjeeling.
6 documented failures
Colin Ashe. CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Christian Dior
Fashion design
Two galleries lost, tuberculosis, and a year in Paris with no income and nowhere to live. The New Look came at forty-two.
Dior checking a New Look hemline himself.
4 documented failures
Colonel Harland Sanders
Restaurants
Fired from two railways and an insurance company, and finished as a lawyer by a courtroom brawl with his own client. Sold his first franchise at sixty-one and his own restaurant at a loss at sixty-five.
In character, Santa Barbara, around 1974 — a decade after he sold the company.
5 documented failures
Dan Lindsay. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Charles de Gaulle
Soldiering and politics
Captured at Verdun, condemned to death by his own country, and out of office for twelve years before founding the republic France still lives under.
Around 1942 — condemned to death by a French court two years earlier.
6 documented failures
Nelson Mandela
Law and politics
Expelled from university, banned, on trial for treason for four and a half years, then jailed for twenty-seven.
April 1994, weeks before the inauguration.
4 documented failures
Paul Weinberg. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Harry S. Truman
Farming and politics
Barred from West Point, lost money in zinc and oil, lost the shop, lost the only election he ever lost — and was still paying the 1922 debts in 1935.
1945. He was still paying off the shop's debts ten years earlier.
5 documented failures
Frank Lloyd Wright
Architecture
Two fires, a massacre, a foreclosure, an arrest, and twelve years of near-silence. Fallingwater came at sixty-seven.
1954, sixteen years after Fallingwater put him back on the cover of Time.
6 documented failures
Julia Child
Cookery writing
Fired for insubordination, rejected by the WACs and the WAVES for being too tall, flunked her cooking-school final, and had her book dropped after eight years. Published at forty-nine.
1978. She did not cook seriously until she was thirty-six.
4 documented failures
Lynn Gilbert. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Soldiering
A knee injury nearly cost him his commission, the Armistice cost him his war, his best idea nearly got him court-martialled — and he spent sixteen straight years as a major.
1945. Four years earlier he was a lieutenant colonel.
6 documented failures
Ernest Shackleton
Polar exploration
Sent home in disgrace from his first expedition, beaten into fourth place in an election, turned back ninety-seven miles from the Pole, then lost his ship.
Bain News Service. He never reached the South Pole and never crossed Antarctica.
5 documented failures
Zaha Hadid
Architecture
Won the competition, was made to compete again, won again — and it still was not built. Fourteen years before a building of hers existed.
2011, seven years after the Pritzker and eighteen after her first completed building.
3 documented failures
Columbia GSAPP. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Joan Rivers
Comedy
Seven years of unpaid rooms and temp typing — then, as a last-minute replacement, Johnny Carson told her on air she was going to be a star.
During the seven years — in the trio Jim, Jake & Joan.
3 documented failures
Steve Carell
Acting
Four network shows cancelled under him in nine years — one after seven episodes — before he was Michael Scott.
Long after the four cancellations.
4 documented failures
Peabody Awards. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Wilma Rudolph
Athletics
Lost at her first big meet, went out in the heats at sixteen, became pregnant in her final year of school — and won three golds at twenty.
15 September 1960, days after taking three golds in Rome.
4 documented failures
Henk Lindeboom / Anefo, Nationaal Archief. CC BY-SA 3.0 NL, via Wikimedia Commons.
Miguel de Cervantes
Novelist and playwright
He was held as a slave in Algiers for nearly five years, jailed twice while working for the Crown, and published no book at all in the twenty years before Don Quixote.
Title page of the first edition of Don Quixote, Madrid, 1605 - his first book in twenty years.
9 documented failures
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Novelist
He was put in front of a firing squad at twenty-eight, buried two magazines, his wife and his brother in the space of two years, and took 3,000 roubles on terms that would have handed a publisher nine years of everything he wrote if he missed one deadline.
11 documented failures
Marie Curie
Physicist and chemist
Warsaw's universities would not admit women, Kraków would not give her an assistant's job, and the Académie des sciences voted her down ten months before she collected her second Nobel Prize.
8 documented failures
Jesse Owens
Sprinter and long jumper
A week after his fourth gold medal in Berlin the Amateur Athletic Union suspended him from amateur competition, and by Christmas he was racing a horse in Havana for money.
9 documented failures
Bruce Lee
Actor and martial artist
The one American television series that gave him a continuing role was cancelled after a single season, he was passed over for the lead in Kung Fu, and he spent months in bed from August 1970 being told he would never practise martial arts again.
8 documented failures
Giuseppe Verdi
Composer
The Milan Conservatory turned him down at eighteen — too old, foreign, and holding his hands wrong at the piano — and eight years later La Scala cancelled his comic opera after one night.
3 documented failures
Hayao Miyazaki
Animation director
He flew to Sweden for the rights to Pippi Longstocking and Astrid Lindgren would not see them, two later feature proposals were rejected outright, and he was forty-three before a film he directed broke through.
9 documented failures
Photo by Natasha Baucas, 2009. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Maria Montessori
Physician and educator
Strongly discouraged from reading medicine, she dissected her cadavers alone after hours, and registered her own son as born of unknown parents.
13 documented failures
Alfred Hitchcock
Film director
The first film he was given to direct was pulled when the money ran out. The next two were withheld by their own distributor. Between 1941 and 1961 he was nominated for Best Director five times and never won.
8 documented failures
Tina Turner
Rock and soul singer
She left her husband and her act in 1976 and the lawsuits followed her, two solo albums failed to chart, her label parted ways with her, and she spent the turn of the decade on the cabaret circuit.
Turner at the Palais des sports Saint-Sauveur, Lille, 19 October 1990, on the Foreign Affair farewell tour - six years after Private Dancer.
8 documented failures
Pierre André Leclercq, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Benjamin Disraeli
Novelist and prime minister
He lost four elections in three years, was ruined at twenty by South American mining shares, and his first speech in the Commons was shouted down.
Photographed at Osborne on 22 July 1878, at seventy-three and in his second premiership. There is no free image of him in the years this entry is mostly about.
10 documented failures
Charles Goodyear
Inventor
He ran the family hardware business into the ground, was jailed for debt on and off from 1830 to 1855, and was still about two hundred thousand dollars in debt when he died.
13 documented failures
Auguste Rodin
Sculptor
The Beaux-Arts refused him three times, the Salon rejected the first sculpture he offered twice, and he spent most of two decades cutting architectural ornament he did not sign.
Rodin at Meudon in 1905, photographed by Gertrude Käsebier — seven years after the Société des Gens de Lettres refused the Balzac.
7 documented failures
Andy Warhol
Pop artist
The Museum of Modern Art turned down a drawing he offered it free, Leo Castelli turned him down for looking too much like Roy Lichtenstein, and a dealer he thought of going back to in desperation called his new paintings ridiculous.
Warhol with Archie, his pet dachshund, photographed by Jack Mitchell in 1973.
11 documented failures
Jack Mitchell, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Paul Cézanne
Painter
He was turned away from the art school twice by his own account, refused by the Salon for nearly twenty years, and had his first solo exhibition at fifty-six.
12 documented failures
Roald Amundsen
Polar exploration
He sat at the bottom of his university class, lost his Arctic funding when two Americans claimed the North Pole first, and filed for bankruptcy at fifty-two owing 350,000 kroner.
14 documented failures
Jürgen Klopp
Football manager
He played 325 second-division games and never one in the Bundesliga, took Mainz down and could not take them back up, and lost six of his first seven major finals.
Dortmund's season opening, August 2014 — the start of the season that had them in the relegation zone by its midway point.
14 documented failures
Photo by Tim.Reckmann, 2014. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Ignaz Semmelweis
Obstetrics
He was refused reappointment, was given a teaching post that allowed him only leather mannequins, and waited fourteen years to publish the book that made his case.
12 documented failures
John Logie Baird
Engineer
He crashed a power network trying to make diamonds, came back from Trinidad with most of his capital gone, and was written off as a lunatic in a newspaper's reception.
9 documented failures
Sir Frank Whittle
Engineer
He failed the RAF medical twice as a boy of fifteen and sixteen, was told the jet engine was impracticable, and lost the patent over a £5 renewal fee nobody would pay.
7 documented failures
Antonio Vivaldi
Composer
He was voted out of his job at the Venetian orphanage twice, was barred from Ferrara by a cardinal, and sold his manuscripts at paltry prices to pay for a move to Vienna that came to nothing.
7 documented failures
Lucille Ball
Actor and studio head
Her drama school told her she would not make it, two producers fired her from the chorus, and she made more than seventy-five films without becoming a major star.
Ball in 1944, in the middle of the Queen of the Bs years and seven years before I Love Lucy.
8 documented failures
Lee Iacocca
Motor industry executive
He was fired as president of Ford in a year the company was reported to have made $2 billion, five weeks after it recalled 1.5 million of the small car he was called the moving force behind, and the company that hired him next lost $1.126 billion in his first full year.
Iacocca in 1980, the year Chrysler lost $1.7 billion.
7 documented failures
Photo by Bernard Gotfryd, 1980. Library of Congress.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Civil and mechanical engineer
A tunnel flood put him out of work at twenty-one, Parliament shut his railway gauge out of every new line outside the West Country, and the largest ship in the world made her first Atlantic crossing with thirty-five paying passengers.
13 documented failures
Rembrandt van Rijn
Painter and etcher
He surrendered everything he owned to a court the day before his fiftieth birthday, lost his house at a foreclosure auction, and had the largest painting he ever made returned to him weeks after it was hung.
5 documented failures
Frida Kahlo
Painter
She trained to be a doctor, began painting in a plaster corset, could not live off the work until she was nearly forty, and had her first solo show in her own country fifteen months before she died.
9 documented failures
Edvard Munch
Painter
His breakthrough painting was hung by the entrance of the 1886 autumn exhibition and jeered by the crowd, his Berlin exhibition was voted shut after one week by the society that had invited him, and at forty-four he entered a nerve clinic.
9 documented failures
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Mathematician
He lost his college scholarship after a year, failed the examination that would have let him into university, and wrote to mathematicians in England who did not reply.
3 documented failures
Jerry Seinfeld
Comedian
Fired from his first acting job on television without being told, and his pilot tested so badly that NBC left it off the schedule and ordered four episodes.
10 documented failures
Photo: Alan Light, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0.
John Glenn
Astronaut and senator
He was picked as the backup for the first American in space, then spent ten years failing to win a Senate seat in his own state.
9 documented failures
Alan Shepard
Astronaut
He was beaten into space by three weeks, had his second flight cancelled with the capsule already named and painted, and was then grounded for years by his own inner ear.
9 documented failures
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Lawyer and Supreme Court justice
She tied for first in her law school class, was turned down by twelve firms, and four years later was told her salary was low because her husband earned well.
6 documented failures
Jimmy Carter
39th President of the United States
He finished third in a primary for a governorship that went to a segregationist, and fourteen years later was turned out of the White House by a margin of 440 electoral votes.
7 documented failures
Showing 115 of 115.
Your turn
Nobody is going to give you permission. That is the whole problem, and it is also the whole solution — it was always yours to grant.
