How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Recorded Richard Leakey said elsewhere, not written here
So Cambridge rejected me. Quite rightly, although at the time I thought it was a little churlish. So, I had to do it without any university training. ... and I began to realize that there were probably a lot more of these things, and that if you find these things, you get a position in the ladder which you can’t get to unless you have either got an education or something else. So by finding important things, you immediately get into the game, which you’d been excluded from otherwise.

Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 21 June 2007 source ↗

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George Lucas Filmmaker; creator of Star Wars and founder of Lucasfilm
Whenever you’re making a movie, especially when you’re writing, you always have self-doubts. I did the first location shooting in Tunisia.
Recorded Academy of Achievement, Academy of Achievement interview, Skywalker Ranch, California, 1 June 1999 source ↗
Derek Sivers Founder of CD Baby; author of Anything You Want
In the end, I had to pay $3.3 million dollars to buy back that 90%.
Recorded Essay on sive.rs, Derek Sivers, 27 May 2009 source ↗
Drew Houston Co-founder and chief executive of Dropbox
No one has a 5.0 in real life. In fact, when you finish school, the whole notion of a GPA just goes away. When you're in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you're not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you're not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable.
Recorded MIT 147th Commencement, MIT News (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 7 June 2013 source ↗
Ben Bradlee Executive editor of The Washington Post, 1968–1991
We made one mistake in a story in which we said that — Woodward and Bernstein said — that there was a slush fund of $300,000 set up in the Committee to Re-elect the President, and it was controlled by Haldeman, and that one of the witnesses had testified to that slush fund to the grand jury investigating Watergate. ... It turned out that he hadn’t been asked, and that interested us a great deal, because if the prosecution wasn’t asking him those interesting questions, that suggested that there was a reason they weren’t, and the reason might be that they were trying to cover it up. Anyway, it took two days, and we got confirmation that there was, and in fact there was a slush fund of $750,000.
Recorded Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 1 May 2003 source ↗

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Question What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore? Time & hindsight
It’s very hard to give people advice, because you don’t know their personality. Personality is a big part of that. Everybody is faced with passing opportunities. Many people watch the opportunity come and watch it go. I say, if an opportunity comes and you have got the self-confidence, grab it. Ride it for a bit. If it’s not the right opportunity, do something else, but be positive about opportunities.
Recorded Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 21 June 2007 source ↗

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