Success is 99 Failure

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فایل صوتی داستان؛ با سه سرعت متفاوت

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot … and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life … and that is why I succeed.

Michael Jordan was one of the greatest athletes of all time, but like all great people, he also failed regularly. Watching Michael Jordan play basketball was like watching a man fly. His grace and talent were unmatched.

Clearly he had a lifetime of training and incredible natural talent, but these weren’t the only things that made him great. He also had a healthy relationship with failure. Like many greats in sports and business, he wasn’t discouraged by failure. The shots he missed and the games that he lost didn’t make him give up. He knew that failure was just another chance for him to improve.

Many highly successful people in the world of sports and business have this healthy relationship with failure. One of the world’s most famous inventors, Thomas Edison made thousands of attempts at creating a light bulb. He tried hundreds of materials for the light bulb filament, but there was always a problem. Some would burn out. Others would explode. Some would melt the glass.

There were always problems, but he never gave up and he never saw his failure as a failure.

He just saw it as a step towards success. Edison once said, I have not failed.

I have merely found 10,000 ways that won’t work. This attitude of seeing failure as a learning experience helped him persevere. This way of thinking eventually led him to Japan, where he found a kind of bamboo, which was the perfect material for his light bulb invention.

It was also in the country of Japan, where a man named Soichiro Honda also found success through failure. He failed over and over on his way to becoming one of the world’s richest men. Soichiro was born in 1906 in a small town in rural Japan. Soichiro’s father was a blacksmith, but he also had a small bicycle repair shop. Soichiro grew up helping his father fix bicycles. He was always talented with fixing things, but he wasn’t a good student, so his grade reports weren’t good. During this time in Japan, parents were required to mark their children’s grade reports with the family seal to confirm that they had received them. Soichiro was a clever child. He realized that he could use rubber from the bicycle shop to fake his parents’ family seal. He soon started making them for other children at his school as well.

Soichiro was caught, but this was one of the earliest examples of how Soichiro would always look for opportunity in his failures. After dropping out of school at the age of 15, Soichiro went to Tokyo to become a mechanic. He worked in a car repair shop for six years before returning to his hometown to open his own repair shop. In addition to fixing cars, he was also a designer.

He spent years trying to design a better piston ring to sell to Toyota. He worked day and night on his design. He often had trouble finding the money to continue his piston project. However, he never let any of life’s challenges stop him. He always found a way. Once he even sold his wife’s jewelry to make the money he needed to continue his piston design. After two years of hard work, finally his piston design was ready. He brought it to Toyota thinking that they would buy it and he would be a big success. To his surprise, they rejected it.

Soichiro still didn’t give up. He knew that he needed more education, so he went back to school. At school, his classmates and teachers laughed at his design, but this didn’t stop Soichiro either. He studied hard in any course that would help him follow his dream and he ignored the rest. He also refused to take tests because he didn’t see any value in grades. When the school told him he wouldn’t graduate, he didn’t care. He famously told the school that their diploma had less value than a movie ticket. While a ticket would give you entry to a movie, he thought that a diploma wouldn’t get him anything.

He never gave up on his goal to design a better piston. He was always looking at the problems with his older designs and thinking about how he could make them better. All of his failures were really opportunities to understand what works and how to improve. After many failures and many new models, he finally had a design to again show to Toyota. This time they liked it and made a contract to buy many of them from Soichiro.

He now needed to build a factory to produce his pistons, but he had new problems. Japan was at war and building supplies were hard to get. Almost everything was being used by the government for the war effort. Soichiro needed concrete for his factory, but it was impossible for him to get any.

Just like when he was a child with bad grades, he always looked for the opportunities in every problem. He couldn’t get concrete so he developed a new way to produce concrete. Of course, things did not go smoothly after he solved his concrete problem. He finally built his factory, but it was bombed twice by American planes.

The planes didn’t only drop bombs. They also dropped their empty gas cans.

Again, Soichiro found the hidden opportunity. Steel was also in short supply, so he and his workers collected all the American gas cans that they could find. Soichiro called them gifts from Truman and used them as supplies for his factory. Finally Soichiro’s factory that he had worked so hard to build was destroyed by an earthquake.

By the time the war had ended, Japan was in a hard situation. Now, gasoline was in short supply, but Soichiro was again looking for opportunities in every situation. Needing a way to get around that used little gas, he attached an engine to his bicycle. His neighbors soon found out and wanted a motorbike too. He had found a great business opportunity, but he didn’t have the money to finance it. Again, he was creative. He didn’t go to a bank and ask for a loan. He wrote a letter to 18,000 bicycle shop owners around Japan and asked them for support. He told them that the country needed new ideas to rebuild and he asked them to join him in helping Japan. 5,000 of them agreed. With the money he earned, he went on to design the Honda Cub motorbike. Just like all of his other projects, his Cub motorbikes had problems.

They were redesigned again and again, but eventually they became a big success all over the world. Over time, Soichiro’s company produced 60 million Cubs, making the Honda Cub the highest selling motor vehicle in history.

As everyone knows, Soichiro Honda continued his success designing and producing cars. What most people don’t know is that he owes much of it to his relationship with failure. He once said, Success is 99 percent failure.’ Just like Jordan he understood that failure is just a part of success. Like Edison working on his light bulb, Soichiro knew that through failure, you know what doesn’t work. And from there, you move on improving, trying again and always looking for what opportunity is hidden in life’s challenges and failures.