Doing anything amazing turns out to be really hard. Incredibly hard. In the startup world sometimes we thought there were instant successes when people hacked together a website and the next day they had millions of users. There are no instant successes. Good products take time to build. We have to fight for every user. When we see that a user deleted our app it seems like the end of the world. Basically when you’re building something at any moment you can be really close to giving up. The question is how many times should you really try before you call it quits? So we looked at people who succeeded after having failed a lot.
How Many Times?
3 times Steven Spielberg was rejected by University of Southern California. Later he dropped out to become a director.
26 times Tim Ferris’s book The 4 Hour WorkWeek was rejected by publishers
104 times an average couple has sex before conceiving
162 times the author of this infographic made searches for this data
300 times founder of Pandora.com approached investors before he got funding
400 times a National Geographic photographer shoots before getting the final image
1009 times Colonel Sanders who just started KFC was turned down when he tried selling his fried chicken recepie
5126 times James Dyson created failed prototypes of his vacuum cleaner before succeeding