Adapt

Tim Harford in his book “Adapt; Why Success Always Starts with Failure” tries to tell us that that success needs some sacrifices and the main one is the ability to admit failure and make effective use of failures by getting lessons from it. Most successful enterprises, according to him, are built through a process of tentative and adaptation, not planning. Learn by failing is a practice lived by almost every successful entrepreneur throughout the world. Not everyone who's famous today got there with success after success. Those who have written the history of success in the world were more than often faced with numerous obstacles and failures that forced them to work harder and show more determination than others. Here are some examples; Henry Ford, While Ford is today known for his innovative assembly line and American-made cars, he wasn't an instant success. In fact, his early businesses failed and left him broke five time before he founded the successful Ford Motor Company. Soichiro Honda; The billion-dollar business that is Honda began with a series of failures. Honda was refused by Toyota Motor Corporation after interviewing for a job as an engineer, leaving him jobless for quite some time. He started making scooters of his own at home, and spurred on by his neighbors, finally started his own business. Bill Gates; Gates didn't seem like a shoe-in for success after dropping out of Harvard and starting a failed first business with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen called Traf-O-Data. While this early idea didn't work, Gates' later work did, creating the global empire that is Microsoft. Albert Einstein; Most of us take Einstein's name as synonymous with genius, but he didn't always show such promise. Einstein did not speak until he was four and did not read until he was seven, causing his teachers and parents to think he was mentally handicapped, slow and anti-social. Eventually, he was expelled from school and was refused admittance to the Zurich Polytechnic School. It took him a bit longer, but he caught on pretty well in the end, winning the Nobel Prize and changing the face of modern physics. Thomas Edison; In his early years, teachers told Edison he was "too stupid to learn anything." Work was no better, as he was fired from his first two jobs for not being productive enough. Even as an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. Of course, all those unsuccessful attempts finally resulted in the design that worked.