It’s so awesome to learn how these success stories got their start.
Some of them “never had a chance” according to the naysayers around them.
1. Walt Disney Does The Impossible
According to Disney: “Somehow I can’t believe there are any heights that can’t be scaled by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four C’s. They are Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, and Constancy and the greatest of these is Confidence.”
2. Guy Laliberté Risks It All In Los Angeles
According to Laliberté: “It was live or die in L.A. And we bet everything on one night. By the end of the show we had standing ovations. The day after, tickets were selling like crazy. I bet everything on that one night. If we failed, there was no cash for gas to come home.”
3. A.P. Giannini Bets On The Little Guy
When a massive earthquake hit San Francisco in 1906, all the banks in the city closed down to assess their damage. People couldn’t get access to their funds at the time they needed it the most. The earthquake demolished Giannini’s bank but he opened up shop by setting up a desk using two barrels and a plank of wood across them. He would lend money to people based on a handshake to help them rebuild their lives. He also went on to fund entrepreneurs like Walt Disney who nobody believed in and projects like the Golden Gate Bridge that were considered too crazy to invest in.
4. Anita Roddick Is Forced To Survive
According to Roddick: “For myself, I needed to earn money, to look after the kids while my husband was traveling for two years across South America… I started The Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon’s advice to take sales of £300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.”
5. George Lucas Challenges Traditional Business Models
According to Lucas: “My first six years in the business were hopeless. There are a lot of times when you sit and you say ‘Why am I doing this? I’ll never make it. It’s just not going to happen. I should go out and get a real job and try to survive’. I thought Star Wars was too wacky for the general public. Right or wrong this is my movie, this is my decision, and this is my creative vision, and if people don’t like it, they don’t have to see it.”
6. Ted Turner Decides To Be Successful
According to Turner: “All my life people have said that I wasn’t going to make it… I’ve never run into a guy who could win at the top level in anything today and didn’t have the right attitude, didn’t give it everything he had, at least while he was doing it; wasn’t prepared and didn’t have the whole program worked out.”
7. Milton Hershey Doesn’t Give Up
But he still refused to give up. He started a new business with a former employee of his and moved from making caramels to chocolate. After 10 years of failure, Hershey finally hit on a winning business. His company expanded year after year and if he had listened to his friends and family through those 10 years of failure we would never have known the Hershey Chocolate bar.
What do you think?
7 pretty incredible people in my opinion.
