The Billionaire Who Failed 5,126 Times

If you failed at accomplishing your dreams 100 times, would you keep trying? What about 1,000 times? If you failed 5,126 times, would you ever try again?

James Dyson, founder and CEO of Dyson — you know, the company with the cool vacuum cleaners — did just that. He failed 5,126 times to create a prototype for his G-Force vacuum cleaner. It was on the 5,127th time that he succeeded. Even after he successfully created his prototype, he was rejected by every manufacturer and distributor in the UK, because they didn’t want his bagless design. He ended up launching his vacuum cleaner in Japan.

It took him 15 years and almost his entire savings to develop his innovative vacuum cleaner, which is the best selling vacuum cleaner in the US (and he’s a billionaire).

He’s quoted as saying that each of the 5,126 failures taught him something new that led to his success.

After reading that story, would you try one more time now? If you’re allowing past failures to keep you from trying again, you’re doing life wrong.

Here are some quick tips on how you can use your past failures to fuel your success:

• First of all, don’t give up. The worst thing you can do is give up on your dream. You never know whether your next try will be the one that actually succeeds.
• Remind yourself of your accomplishments. When you’re feeling defeated, remember all the times you succeeded.
• Don’t just focus on what you got wrong in each failure. Also consider the things you did right and use that as motivation.
• Recalibrate your aim. Make the necessary adjustments so that you don’t repeat the same mistakes on your next attempt.
• Keep your mission in focus. When you remember why you started in the first place, it keeps you hungry enough to keep going in spite of failure.

We all fail at various things, probably hundreds if not thousands of times in life. What separates people who succeed from people who don’t is try #5,127.

Keep going.

As always, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram or Facebook and let me know how these tips work for you. To hear a more in depth conversation on this topic, check out my Master Your Mission podcast daily on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

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