“Every year you work, you work towards something, towards a goal, right? Which is to get a promotion, be able to take care of your family, to be able to provide the house for them or take care of your parents. ... You work towards a goal. It’s not a failure; it’s steps to success. There's always steps to it ... Michael Jordan played 15 years, won six championships; the other nine years was a failure? That's what you're telling me? There is no failure in Sports. You know, there's good days, bad days."
In 2023, Giannis the superstar Basketball player had pretty much every oddsmaker predicting that his team, the Milwaukee Bucks would win the Basketball championship in the NBA only to be eliminated right away in a rather humiliating fashion by a team that on paper was far worse, the Miami Heat. Eventually, Miami made it to the finals. The amount of negativity Giannis took for this failure from the press was overwhelming, and that was his automatic response to stop the press from hounding him, during a live interview, not your typical cliche. Sometimes there are reasons why certain people can elevate themselves to the top rungs of their field.
Concluding this article may seem a bit premature as there are still four entries left. In reality, it can end here, with this quote. Failure doesn’t exist, it’s simply part of the journey. However, I have to complete the format I adhere to and provide four more entries.
"There's no crying in Baseball"
Have you ever wondered why people are so infatuated with sports? It’s a fun way to learn common business principles, like teamwork and success. The big bonus is it doesn’t even feel like a boring lecture, and yes this can apply to Baseball, a game that can often seem dull to the youthful and mature audience alike. When watching it live it also feels like a relaxing picnic where you can lay back and simply enjoy a beer and a snack with greenery everywhere and a few well-timed exciting moments to break the monotony that is inevitable when enjoying peace and quiet.
However, baseball movies are simply the best sports movies for relating a game to the real world. The movie “A League of Their Own,” starring Tom Hanks, embodies the themes of overcoming failure and pursuing dreams. The true heroines of the story are the boundary-breaking women, under extreme pressure as trend-setters tasked with building a business from the ground up that never existed before, a Women’s professional baseball league. It’s easy to buckle under such pressure and just break down and cry or weep, especially when your manager feels like his job is a demotion and a sign of the lack of success in his life and takes it out on his employees.
Is it alright to cry? Yes, is it alright to feel like your life is going nowhere? Sure. What you can learn from this movie is how each character dealt with it on their terms and succeeded in their way.
"It’s not funny to me, It’s heartbreaking to me. It’s something that I wanted to be special and amazing, it didn’t turn out that way. In the midst of chaos, there’s opportunity. It [Fyre] is the most iconic festival that never was. I have plans to create the iconic festival, but you didn’t hear that from me."
Picture a music festival that people paid thousands to attend that never happened because it was just a front for a money-making scam. Then picture everyone left in the wake of the aftermath trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered careers, businesses, and jobs. That was the Fyre Festival as described in the video. A few years have passed, and the people involved have decided to learn from it, as both musician Ja Rule, the face of the scam, and businessman Billy McFarland (who went to jail) are bouncing back.
Although Ja Rule never went to jail, fans hold him responsible. Considering the amount of pain caused does it seem callous for these two people to bring back these memories and continue? The rapper seems to think that enough time has passed, and yes time is needed for redemption. What would you do if you walked in Ja Rule’s shoes? Watch the video above to learn more.
Take the case of Elizabeth Holmes, the first self made female billionaire ever just a decade ago. Her company Theranos was all the rage back then, now, no one remembers it and she’s in jail for over promising and under-delivering, i.e misleading investors. Like many tech titans she dropped out of Stanford University in 2003 to start Theranos. Her tech became a product called ‘Edison’, a product that could conduct comprehensive medical tests from just a small sample of blood. Problem was, it couldn’t do that and ‘Edison’ turned outto be a fraud. Investors are never happy losing money so this earned her a prison sentence. Initially sentenced to 11 and a half years in prison, this was later downgraded to 9. Let’s see how the story of Elizabeth Holmes ends as she doesn’t look like the type that gives up, hopefully having learned her lesson the hard way.
Like the Energizer bunny, William Hung just kept going and going no matter how much his batteries were drained. If sheer enthusiasm could ever be measured or converted to heat or energy from some futuristic AI, William would be it’s model that trained it. The clip above showed a reaction from talent judges that should have killed his ‘career’. Instead it propelled him to stardom as he managed to sell 200,000 albums without being able to sing, or dance. He even audaciously called one of his albums ‘Hung for christmas’. Some would consider that failure, but only a handful of aspiring musicians can make those record sales, making his music career a success in his eyes, the only eyes that matter. He converted his singing career to a job performing crime analysis, something his Civil Engineering degree had nothing to do with. He did it successfully anyway. Guess what he does now? It’s the job he was always meant for, a motivational speaker and proof that enthusiasm can go along way towards overcoming ‘failure’. Just keep your head up high.
Rock The Bells(Ja Rule), New York Times(Ja Rule), IMDB(Ja Rule), The Guardian(Ja Rule), Rolling Stone (Billy McFarland), ABC News (Elizabeth Holmes), Business Insider(Elizabeth Holmes), Academic accelerator (William Hung)
All images are AI-generated using Fotor and are not meant to describe the subject matter they portray factually, but figuratively.
Comments by regular users on social media are also researched.
