While it may feel as if successful people are leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of us, people who have made major career or business accomplishments have also been in the trenches.
In fact, management guru Simon Sinek said all successful people have hit rock bottom before reaching their pinnacle.
“I have never met a successful person in my life who learned anything when things went well,” Sinek told Chris Williamson in his podcast Modern Wisdom. “They learned every lesson they needed to learn that helped them achieve when things went horribly wrong.”
“The most successful people in the world—every single one of them—hit zero or came damn close to it, almost every single time,” he continued. Failure is “the gift.”
Wang emphasized, however, failure only works in favor of success if you learn from it, though.
“You have to figure out what worked and what didn’t, and then focus on what needs to be improved instead of thrashing around and changing everything,” he said. “The people who failed didn’t necessarily work less [than those who succeeded]. They could actually have worked more; it’s just that they made more unnecessary changes.”
