Significant Flourishing Failures

by: Dave A. Ornado, Ed. D.

“For a righteous man may fall seven times and rise again.”
All human creatures, men and women, fall in three categories, in relationship to being successful. Those who are successful, those who aren’t successful and those who are on their way to being successful. If we were to subdivide them even further we could mention those who are on their way to success and those who were successful at one time. I don’t care who you are, we all wish to be part of the successful bunch. We all want to be somebody. We all want to make it to the top of the heap.
For a very logical reason we tend to identify with the successful ones. We like to hear the success stories. We like the stories with a happy ending. We like fairy tales because, at the end, they get married and live happily ever-after. There is something about prosperity and in a life of success that appeals to our most inner self.
Society hammers into our brains the idea that success is to be measured with goods. The media claims that he who dies with the most toys wins. And we all want not only the best but the latest toys. We all want to win.
Speaking personally, my father wouldn’t allow his children to go to a secular school. All he wanted for us was to enter a seminary and serve God. Thus, three of my brothers have finished theology. I was only 17 when my life was a topsy-turvy leaping from one school to another because of no direction in life. Then, I went to enroll in a prominent university and started to work to earn my own way. But through faith in God and sensing his purpose for my life, hard work, and determination I not only graduated from college but also from graduate school. True, I started late, but I made it. You can too. And I’ve realized that not only people who have studied in a seminary can be God’s ministers but as long as one has the heart of sharing His words to others can be His chosen one.
Let me tell you some of notable personalities who have undergone failures but flourished at the end.
Perhaps, you have read about “Einstein was four years old before he could speak and seven before he could read. Beethoven’s music teacher once said of him, ‘As a composer he is hopeless.’ Isaac Newton did poorly in grade school. When a boy, Thomas Edison’s teachers told him he was too stupid to learn anything. F.W. Woolworth got a job in a dry goods store when he was 21, but his employers wouldn’t let him wait on a customer because he ‘didn’t have enough sense.’ A newspaper editor fired Walt Disney because he had ‘no good ideas.’ Enrico Caruso’s music teacher told him, ‘You can’t sing. You have no voice at all.’ And the director of the Imperial Opera in Vienna told Madame Schumann-Heink that she would never be a singer and advised her to buy a sewing machine.
Admiral Richard E. Byrd had been retired from the Navy as ‘unfit for service’ until he flew over both Poles. Louis Pasteur was rated as ‘mediocre’ in chemistry when he attended the Royal College. Abraham Lincoln entered the Black Hawk War as a captain and came out as a private. Louisa May Alcott was told by an editor that she could never write anything that had popular appeal. Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade.”
Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame had his chicken recipe rejected 1,009 times before a restaurant accepted it.
Zane Grey became a dentist and hated it. He wrote several novels. They failed. He wrote a western novel, The Last of the Plainsmen. It too was rejected. He was told he had no future as a writer and to give it up. He persisted and was 40 before his first book sold. He had 65 books published while he was alive—24 after he died. His books sold more than 50 million copies. Forty-nine of his novels were made into movies. One million of his books still sell every year.2
Decca Recording Company turned down the Beatles in 1962. They said, “We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitarists are on the way out.” (Yeah right!)
Van Gogh sold only one painting in his entire lifetime and that one was of his own brother.
Richard Hooker spent 17 years writing a humorous war story which was rejected by 21 publishers before William Morrow bought it. The title of the book? MASH! (And we all know the rest of that story.)3
Wilbur and Orville Wright’s father believed that his sons’ desire to fly was heresy. Walt Disney went broke seven times and had a nervous breakdown before becoming successful. And Thomas Edison failed more than 6,000 times before making an electric light bulb that worked.
My advice to one and all is this: Don’t allow your past to determine your future. Discover God’s purpose for your life and, with his help, give it all you’ve got.
Remember, failure is an event—not a person. When you stumble and fall (and you will from time to time), don’t stay down. Get up, learn from your mistakes, and go on! Every day for the rest of your life commit and trust your life and way to God and he will be with you every step of the way.
Take my advice: Don’t allow your past to determine your future. Discover God’s purpose for your life and, with his help, give it all you’ve got.