The World's Most Famous Losers & Why You Should Join The Club

Chop wood and carry water by Joshua Medcalf

Have you ever chopped wood, or fetched water for domestic use?

I haven’t done the first but did the latter regularly as a child growing up in Sub-Saharan Africa.

But this story is not about my childhood woes, but about how failure is a part of greatness.

A reminder that just because you failed, doesn’t mean you won’t succeed.

Failure = Success

The book Chop Wood Carry Water by Joshua Medcalf is a snappy read made up of life lessons set to the tune of Cobra Kai.

It’s a self-help book using a fictional protagonist who had a childhood dream he never grew out of. A dream to be an archer samurai.

As you go through the book, you come to appreciate the difficulties he faced and even envy the relationship he had with his sensei, wishing you had someone like that who was 100% in your corner, leading the way.

But one chapter in the book that caused me to pause and just re-listen was Chapter 22 titled Famous Failures.

Roll call of losers

Let’s take a roll call of all the great people who have failed but did not quit.

• Einstein did not speak till he was 5 years old and was tagged as mentally slow by his teachers. The very same Einstein you know.
• Oprah, the Oprah, had been fired at a point and told she was not fit for television. Steve Jobs and Anna Wintour also suffered the humiliation and uncertainty of being fired from a field they went on to dominate.
• KFC exists because David Sanders’ recipe was rejected by over 1,000 different restaurants. Oh and by this way, this happened to him at the age of 65, not 25.
• It’s said that the owner of Honda started the company after he failed to get his desired engineering job at Toyota.
• Walt Disney lost his job at a local newspaper in Kansas after he was told he lacked creativity and original ideas. Ha, take that.
• The Beetles were told they had no future in show business. Who are these very bad fortune tellers?
• Thomas Edison, the inventor of the first light bulb was told as a child that he was too stupid to learn anything. It took about a thousand tries to get the light bulb right. I imagine every time he failed, those words about him being too stupid kept ringing in his mind. Maybe not after the first couple of failures, but by the hundredth try, he was bound to question if he could do it. Well, if you are reading this at night, you know that he succeeded. He created light.

I could go on and on and on but I will stop there. I am sure you even know some people who failed and went on to succeed. If you don’t mind sharing, mention them in the comments.

Gen Z and their aversion to failure

For every famous loser who went on to succeed, there are non-famous losers who succeeded too. Listening to our parents and relatives and friends, most times you don’t realize what they went through to arrive at where they are until they open up and reveal their struggles and strifes.

But these are things we need to be talking about in our social sphere. We need to highlight the failures on the path to success.

The more we talk about it, the more we can inform the current and future generations that it’s totally normal to fail.

I feel like the current societal norm is to laud 22-year-old billionaires. 19-year-old rich content creators. 15-year-old teenagers who have retired both themselves and their parents.

It gives the idea that people who succeed don’t fail. But in truth, failure is a part of a lot of people’s stories.

For some, it wasn’t despite failure, but because of failure that they succeeded. Being turned away made them start their venture.

How to handle failure

I was listening to a podcast recently where the host was talking about determining and contributory factors to outcomes in life.

He defined contributory factors as anything external to us. That is, our circumstances, things people say, challenges that we face. But none of those determines our outcome, they just contribute to either make it easier or harder to succeed.

For example, you need to go from point A to B. There could be a mountain in your path, an acidic river, and a valley full of snakes. All of those are not why you didn’t get across, but they contributed to making it harder to get across. Except you fall off the mountain and die, in which case that did impede your progress, a bit of realism.

Obstacles are part of the course, they are a feature of the game. They contribute to the excitement or dread.

The 1 determining factor is us.

While some people’s contributory factor could be positive and encouraging, some people’s contributory factor was meant to halt them. To stop them in their tracks.

Now, if we stop and cite the contributory factors as the reason, that would be termed ‘an excuse’. Because the individual is the final determinant of what he or she does. The individual decides whether to continue despite the circumstances or to walk away.

We are the determinant of our fate.

A powerful but scary truth

This can both empower you and drain you. The realization that your fate is in your hands.

It means if it turns out good, you can feel proud, but if it turns out bad, then you have to face responsibility. It can be a difficult place to be, but you should recognize the power this gives you.

The road to success is like a mechanical bull ride. Snatch the bull by the horns and hold on for dear life as it bucks you about.

Either you succeed or you fail.

But now we know that failing is not that bad. Failing might actually be what you need to pursue something greater and maybe one day, you could be inducted into the prestigious club of famous losers.

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