It’s easy to look at famous people and assume that they must have stumbled onto overnight success somehow. We think they were born with amazing talent that was immediately appreciated by the world. Unfortunately, this makes it easy to think that if you’re not successful by now, there’s no point in trying.

Of course, this isn’t true, even though it may seem that way. It’s always good to be reminded that even the biggest successes are almost always preceded by numerous failures, and that persistence is the key to eventually being a success.

Someone emailed me to say they featured my blog in their post 50 Famously Successful People Who Failed At First. I was annoyed that this turned out not to be true (apparently the email was a sloppy copy and paste job), but anyway, it’s a good list of people who reached success only after they had gotten failure out of their system.

It’s broken up into categories: business gurus, scientists and thinkers, inventors, public figures, Hollywood types, writers and artists, musicians, and athletes. But be warned that I noticed a few factual errors.

Here are some of my favorites that I hadn’t heard before, and which appear to be true:

• Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper because “he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”
• Oprah Winfrey was fired from her job as a television reporter because she was “unfit for TV.”
• Elvis Presley was fired and told “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.”

Do you know any successful failures who should be added?

Photo by Hammarstrand

Someone gave me a bottle of this Japanese soft drink called Ramune. I didn’t know what it tasted like, and looking at the bottle didn’t offer any clues. It had pictures of a pig, a pumpkin, a watermelon, a fan, a flower, a life preserver, and a UFO.

But the weirdest part didn’t come until I tried to open it. I tore off the wrap around the top, removed this green plastic piece, and tried twisting the top. But it just wasn’t twisting off.

I read the label to see if it said anything about opening it, and it did:

WARNING

• DO NOT SWALLOW THE PLUNGER. Throw it away immediately after opening.
• Adults should open the bottle for small children and supervise drinking.
• Do not try to remove the marble from the bottle to avoid injury.
• Do not freeze the bottle or store it in direct sunlight.
• Do not consume if the marble is broken, missing, or descended before opening.

Plunger? Oh, that must be that green plastic piece. Good thing I hadn’t thrown it away. After breaking the connectors that attached the inside to the outside, the green thing became a plunger that you could press your thumb on to apply the force to a smaller area.

Marble? The bottle looked like it had a marble stuck in it, but I thought that was part of the top. But no, there really was a marble stuck in it, and to open the bottle you have to push the marble inside.

So I put the plunger on top, and pushed with my thumb. The marble wasn’t going down, and my thumb was getting bent out of shape. Was I doing it wrong?

I checked online, and found that opening a bottle of Ramune is something of a rite of passage. At least for some people, who use everything from hammers to headbutts to get the darn thing open. Then there are others who say it’s not that big a deal, you just push with your thumb. I fell into the former category.

After wearing my thumb out with no luck, I tried using the heel of my hand. Although I wouldn’t be able to push as deep this way, I could exert much more force, and it would hurt a lot less. But after a few failed attempts, I had dug a deep ring into my hand, and drawn a trickle of blood.

Was this supposed to be another Kobayashi Maru?

I decided to bring out the big guns. My hammer was packed away, but my screwdriver was easy to get to and would work just as well. I put the bottle on the counter (so it would absorb the full impact instead of being pushed away), on top of a cork oven pad (so the counter wouldn’t get scratched).

Then I pounded the bottle several times with the base of the screwdriver, well aware that I was just as likely to break the bottle as I was to push the marble in.

The marble looked like it had moved some, so I went back to pushing my thumb on the plunger, and the marble went it, stopping a couple inches down where the bottle narrows.

The bottle then adds insult to injury because even after opening it, the marble blocks the flow when you try to drink it. But with the right angle, I finally enjoyed the pig/pumpkin/UFO-flavored drink known as Ramune. (It actually tastes something like Sprite).

Just yesterday, I was reading something about attacking problems from a non-obvious direction after reaching a mental dead end. This comes from Whole Brain Thinking: Working from Both Sides of the Brain to Achieve Peak Job Performance:

“Visualize the extreme opposite of the situation. Example: If you are trying to invent a gadget to open bottles, pretend you are trying to bond the bottle cap permanently to make it impenetrable. It will thus be easier to discover the weaknesses inherent in the current bottle caps and a way to get the substances that are inside, out–without resorting to the typical removable cap. You might invent a syringelike contraption that extracts the contents rather than beheading the package.”

I have to wonder if the authors wrote this after an encounter with Ramune. (By the way, this is an example of lateral thinking, just one of many crucial concepts covered in Marelisa Fabrega’s ebook How to Be More Creative – A Handbook for Alchemists).

Any usability engineer would go into conniptions about the bottle design. Yet the challenge of opening it is what gives Ramune its mystique and its fan base. I want to get another bottle, not so much to drink it, but just so I can try opening it again (hopefully doing a better job next time).

If a soft drink can teach patience, persistence, and lateral thinking, then what other learning experiences might be hiding in plain sight, disguised as problems?

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Super Bowl XLIII hasn’t started yet, so I don’t know what’s going to happen. It remains to be seen whether the Arizona Cardinals will beat the odds to win their first Super Bowl, while stopping the Pittsburgh Steelers from their record sixth Super Bowl win.

Regardless, nobody expected the Cardinals to make it this far. Although they’re the oldest team in the NFL, they’d never made it to the Super Bowl. Before the season started, oddmakers listed their odds of making it to the Super Bowl at 50 to 1. But they did, becoming only the second team to ever do so with 7 losses.

They might win the Super Bowl tonight, and they might not. But even if they don’t, their strategy will eventually work. That’s because it’s the only way to do anything:

1. Set your goal.
2. Make a plan.
3. Execute your plan.
4a. If successful, proceed to step 5.
4b. If not successful, go back to step 2. Repeat as many times as necessary.
5. Achieve your goal.

This plan might not get you to your goal quickly, but it’s better than the alternative:

1. Set your goal.
2. Do whatever.
3. Give up on your goal.

Of course, other things factor into this, like desire, knowledge, and skill. But if you’re not willing to keep trying, the rest doesn’t matter.

The most brilliant definition of persistence ever:

“Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying. Persistence is having the same goal over and over.” – Seth Godin

(I hate to quote someone’s entire post, but I guess it’s OK if the post is only 21 words.)

Many things require persistence. We’re usually not good at something the first time we try it, and as we all know, practice makes perfect (or if you prefer, practice makes for improvement).

Persistence gets tricky when other people are involved. Someone often won’t do something the first time we ask. That’s why commercials have to run more than once. It’s hard to get someone’s attention, get them interested in doing what we want them to do, have them make time to do it, etc. So we often have to ask more than once.

But how do you ask more than once? Do you just say the same thing over and over again? After all, it eventually worked for Bart and Lisa Simpson with their “Will you take us to Mount Splashmore? Will you take us to Mount Splashmore? Will you take us to Mount Splashmore? Will you take us to Mount Splashmore? Will you take us to Mount Splashmore? Will you take us to Mount Splashmore? Will you take us to Mount Splashmore? Will you take us to Mount Splashmore?”

But using the same tactics over and over can get very annoying. Even if it somehow works the first time, you’re likely to burn bridges in the process, and then it won’t work a second time. Is there a better way of being persistent when asking others for help?

When I wrote The Zen of Blogging, it was well received by those who read it, but with only 20 subscribers, I knew I wasn’t going to get it in front of many people by just posting it to my blog.

On the other hand, if I could get it in front of Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, I thought there was a good chance he’d write a post about it (after all, it’s relevant to his audience). And then I’d get a flood of highly targeted traffic, people interested in blogging, referred by someone who has a reputation as a blogging expert. It was the best promotional opportunity I could hope for.

But how could I grab Darren’s attention? How do you get noticed by someone who gets a thousand emails per second when they don’t know who you are?

First, I left some comments on his blog. While busy bloggers don’t respond to many comments, they probably read most if not all of them. I wanted Darren to see my name and know me as someone who leaves decent comments. This would hopefully make it more likely that he would read the email I was going to send him.

And then I ran into a serious obstacle. Darren wrote a post saying he was going out of town. He wasn’t going to be reachable when my ebook was released.

But another opportunity presented itself. Darren gave an open invitation for guest bloggers to help him keep up the posting while he was gone. If I could have a guest post published, I could put a link to my ebook at the bottom of the post. But the competition was fierce, and my post wasn’t chosen (at least not at the time; it could possibly be chosen down the road).

When I released my ebook, I emailed Darren even though I knew he wasn’t around. I quickly introduced myself, said I knew he was gone but I wanted to tell him about my ebook, and then, most importantly, I told him why he should care. Just a couple of sentences explaining why I thought my ebook would interest him personally, and why it would interest his readers.

When I didn’t get a response, that’s where many people would either (1) give up, or (2) keep emailing him to ask “Did you read my ebook yet? What about now? What about now?” I didn’t want to give up, but I knew that emailing him over and over would just be annoying. So I decided that now just wasn’t the time, and I’d come back to him later. (Some people would have emailed him again after a few days, which I think would have been OK, but I chose not to.)

I saw an opportunity when Darren posted that he had just gotten some help with cleaning up his email inbox from Leo Babauta of Zen Habits. Leo helped him develop a system for dealing with the massive pile of emails he already had (most likely deleting them), and for managing his future emails more efficiently. Darren said he was sorry if he hadn’t gotten back to anyone, but he invited people to resend any emails he might have missed before “the great email culling of 2008.”

So I just emailed him again, saying I was taking him up on his offer to resend emails he might have missed. I told him about my ebook, and now I had some good testimonials to include to get him interested. He wrote back to confirm he got my email, and had added my ebook to his longish list of things to check out. A couple of days later, he posted about it, the traffic starting pouring in, and I had one of my biggest breakthroughs as a blogger.

This happened not because I used the same tactics over and over, but because I had the same goal over and over.

Photo by dbking

In the early 20th century, Thomas Edison was trying to develop a new storage battery, one that was small, light, cheap, durable, and quickly charged. When his first 10,000 attempts didn’t work, a friend showed sympathy for Edison’s failure. Edison replied, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” He persisted and eventually succeeded in creating a battery that was considered by some to be the greatest invention since the incandescent lightbulb.

There are two lessons here: when to give up, and when not to.

Edison had a vision for what his battery would do for the world. He saw electric cars replacing horses and trolleys. He saw cheap electric power replacing steam boilers. He saw electric navigation being used for civilian and military purposes. The possibilities were endless. This was his vision, and he never gave up on it.

However, while Edison did not give up on his vision, he very much did give up on 10,000 specific ways of realizing it. You could say that Thomas Edison was one of the biggest quitters in history.

When one particular method didn’t work, what do you think his response was? Do you think he kept trying the exact same thing over and over again, hoping that the laws of physics would eventually give in to him? Of course not! He noted what didn’t work, and moved on. He might have made other attempts using the same materials in different ways, or using the same techniques with different materials, but he knew that when something didn’t work, continuing to do that same thing wasn’t a viable option.

Edison’s first prototype that did what he wanted used nickel-iron cells and a potash electrolyte. If he had achieved the same results using entirely different materials, do you think that would have been acceptable to him? You bet! What was important was creating a battery that overcame the limitations of other batteries at the time, and made all kinds of practical applications possible. The nickel/iron/potash solution was simply a means of reaching that end, but he would have gladly accepted any other means that accomplished the same result.

Do you have a vision for your future? Hopefully you do, because as Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” Set your sights on what you want your life to be like. You’re free to change your mind whenever you want, but if you take the time to come up with a good vision, it won’t be changing drastically from one day to the next. Stay focused on the life you want, and don’t change your mind unless you decide that certain things aren’t as important to you as you once thought.

How will you make your vision a reality? Will you start out on one path, and head straight down that path until it reaches the glorious end? Not likely. The days when people were expected to work their entire lives at a single company are long gone. Nowadays, most people have 8 different jobs between the ages of 20 and 30. Throw in all the business ventures you might try, and this number will be even higher. And remember that a job or a business is not a static, unchanging process, but one that evolves over time and presents many possible ways of performing it. Altogether this means that you’ll probably try many different things before finding something that produces the desired result, which is your vision of the life you want for yourself.

Take a lesson from Edison: stay focused on where you want to go, but be flexible as to how you get there.