Nothing That Ever Happened To You Is Lost

The Hotpot | November 2025 | By Lisanne

25.11

Get to know the masters of failing forward.

Basketball legend Michael Jordan missed over 9,000 shots and lost nearly 300 games during his career.

When he finally hit the game-winning shot, it was, in his own words, the sum of thousands of failures.

Each missed basket taught him precision under pressure, patience, and the unwavering focus that helped shape the player he became.

Entrepreneur James Dyson took failure to an industrial scale—a total of 5,126 vacuums flopped before he perfected one.

Each broken prototype exposed flaws in suction, airflow, or design. Every non-working machine became a step closer to a product that ended up redefining cleaning.

Those thousands of failures served as a detailed, essential blueprint for the machine that eventually made him a billionaire.

The same principle guided Bill Gates, who lost a painful $50 million investing in a failed biomass-to-fuel plant through his non-profit.

The loss taught him what could and couldn’t scale, the realities of innovation, and the value of experimentation. That $50 million wasn’t totally wasted—it informed his future work in clean energy and philanthropy, lessons money alone can’t buy.

Beyond the industrial sphere, refusal happens to the artist as well. Even though a Van Gogh painting will cost you upwards $100 million nowadays, the famous painter sold only one painting during his lifetime. Despite painting every day, The Red Vineyard was the sole work to find a buyer, earning him a mere $2,000.

Each stroke, each experiment with color and light, was practice in persistence. His failures to sell his work didn’t stop him—they allowed him to explore emotion and form freely, giving the world Starry Night and Sunflowers. Those years of seeming futility, helped his vision to mature.

Despite his incredible success as a movie director, Steven Spielberg, was rejected by the USC School of Cinematic Arts multiple times.

Being turned away forced him to make films on his own, borrowing cameras, teaching himself narrative and pacing.

Those early experiments shaped the cinematic instincts behind Jaws, the first true summer blockbuster. The rejections didn’t stop him—they gave him the freedom to invent a new style of storytelling.

Also Walt Disney was fired from the Kansas City Star for “lacking imagination,” and his early animation ventures failed repeatedly.

Each setback forced him to refine technique, story, and vision. By the time Snow White premiered, he had the skill and insight to create the first full-length animated feature that would redefine childhood imagination worldwide.

On top of that, talk show host Oprah Winfrey was fired from her job as a Baltimore news anchor for ‘caring too much’.

After a couple of twists and turns, she landed People Are Talking, a morning show where she was allowed to move effortlessly from interviewing the Carvel ice cream man to Benny from All My Children. That experience paved the way for The Oprah Winfrey Show, a show built entirely around her ability to connect deeply with audiences.

Her emotional investment became the foundation of her media empire, turning what was once seen as a weakness into her defining strength.

At last, J.K. Rowling faced twelve rejections before Harry Potter found a publisher. Every “no” forced her to refine characters, strengthen plot, and clarify her vision. Those rejections didn’t stop her—they prepared her for the scrutiny, scale, and persistence that a global phenomenon would demand.

In short, every failure in these people’s lives served a specific purpose.

Each miss, rejection, prototype, or loss added a layer of skill, insight, resilience, and clarity.

Nothing is truly lost. It just changes form—quietly shaping the next shot, the next brushstroke, the next invention, the next story.

Failures are not dead ends. They are the soil from which extraordinary things grow.

Thank you for reading! The journal prompt of today:

What’s one thing I can carry forward from my last failure?

Let me know in the comments.

 
 
 
Curious to see more reflections like this? Click through to see the rest of the series on success. I’d love to hear what resonates with you.