How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Recorded Melanie Perkins said elsewhere, not written here
To launch Canva, we needed investment and a tech team. Finding the right people for both took two years but there is always a lot of rejection for entrepreneurs in their early days. But every time we got a hard question or a reason why people wouldn't invest, we stayed focused on what we could change. I revised our pitch deck after every meeting, more than 100 times in one year, to answer the questions or fix the reason for rejection from the last time. You just have to keep going. The normal thing to do after your 100th, 80th or even 20th ‘no’ would be to stop, but you just have to persevere.

Irish Tech News interview source ↗

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Norman Borlaug Plant pathologist and agronomist; Nobel Peace Prize, 1970
So we had to take this special exam and I flunked it. Erv Upton passed it, and I was scared. I figured if I failed it, I wouldn’t have any chance of getting in. So I failed it beautifully. ... And so it was the first year of this general college, which gave an Associate of Arts degree after two years, and that was expected to be a terminal course. It turned out it wasn’t.
Recorded Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 12 May 2008 source ↗
Carlos Slim Helú Businessman and investor; chairman of Grupo Carso and América Móvil
Well yes, but like I said, small mistakes or small failures. We take small failures very often. We have failures in investment. We have failures in operation, but no big mistakes or big failures. How do we take that? Like ordinary business.
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview, 2 December 2007 source ↗
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan Structural biologist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 2009
Well, I'll be honest with you. I was a theoretical physicist but my Ph.D. work was on a problem that was not particularly interesting to me at the time. And I used to subscribe to Scientific American and I found that there were all these wonderful discoveries happening in biology and I also knew that a number of physicists had gone into biology and been successful. So, I decided to switch.
Recorded Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded minutes after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 7 October 2009 source ↗
Agnès Varda Film director, photographer and installation artist
I have never made any money from my films but I have won prizes and recognition. I have been on the margins forever. They all came to see me receive the award - there was Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Richard Gere and so on. I was imagining what they would all be worth in money terms. You see I was never bankable, I could not bring any money ever to the table. I like the friendships and, yes, the admiration but I don’t want to make a big fuss about it. I will go on working as long as I am able!
Recorded Richard Mowe, Eye For Film feature interview, 12 February 2018 source ↗

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