Failure can feel lonely, but it’s one of the few experiences successful people share. From entrepreneurs to musicians, athletes, and political leaders, failure is often a crucial step on the path to greatness. Take it from the people who know best—people who’ve turned setbacks into comebacks. Their stories show that redefining failure as an opportunity for personal and professional growth can lead to lasting success in business and life.
Why failure is important for entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship is all about exploring new frontiers. That means trying new things that don’t always work out. Here are three ways entrepreneurs can reframe failure as a way to build character and inner strength:
Learning opportunities
A successful person can take setbacks and use them as learnings for how to adjust actions in the future. As Thomas Edison, famously credited as the inventor of the light bulb, once said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” In this way, each failure helps guide the path to success.
Character building
Failure can also give you valuable information about yourself. How you respond to failure speaks volumes about your character. Do you give up or use it as an opportunity for self-improvement and growth? Using mistakes as a way to examine your internal responses can help not only guide you through inevitable future failures, but also how you handle subsequent success.
Community building
While failure may feel embarrassing, it’s important to remember everybody fails. The more you experience failure, the more you connect to all types of people. The experience of failure is something that all humans have in common—from interns to CEOs.
20 famous failure quotes
Some of the most successful people of all time have spoken about their experiences overcoming failure. Here are just a few examples of motivational quotes from names filling your history books (and a few non-famous people who had great advice anyway):
1. “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” —Maya Angelou
2. “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” —Theodore Roosevelt
3. “Giving up is the only sure way to fail.” —Gena Showalter
4. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” —This classic quote is often misattributed to Winston Churchill, but it actually comes from a 1930s Budweiser commercial.
5. “You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” —Johnny Cash
6. “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” —Paulo Coelho
7. “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” —Michael Jordan
8. “The glory of life is not never falling. The true glory consists in rising each time we fall.” —Chinmayananda Saraswati
9. “My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.” —Abraham Lincoln
10. “Only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly.” —Robert F. Kennedy
11. “The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.” —Elbert Hubbard
12. “It’s failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.” —Ellen DeGeneres
13. “Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.” —Lance Armstrong
14. “Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.” —Though often attributed to American founding father Benjamin Franklin, it’s not clear where this wise phrase comes from. It’s a useful sentiment, regardless.
15. “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” —Barack Obama
16. “I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.” —Herbert Bayard Swope
17. “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” —Unknown
18. “Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.” —George Eliot
19. “I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless.” —Neal Shusterman
20. “A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” —James Joyce
18 failure quotes from successful entrepreneurs
It’s not just presidents, bestselling authors, or famous musicians and athletes who have overcome failures. Entrepreneurs from all walks of life have learned to deal with failure, too—huge tech CEOs and small business owners alike. Here are some nuggets of wisdom from them:
1. “Failure is the successful discovery of something that does not work.” —Tobi Lütke, Shopify CEO and& co-founder
2. “If you can take something away that’s transferable, it isn’t really a failure.” —Wil Yeung, YouTube chef and entrepreneur, Yeung Man Cooking
Yeung’s reframing of failure as an important learning opportunity helped jettison him to a successful career as not only an online chef with well over a million subscribers, but a savvy businessman with several books, product lines, and cooking courses under his brand.
3. “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.” —Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder
For Steve Jobs, even death was a motivator to overcome a fear of failure.
4. “I think a lot of imposter syndrome actually comes from fear…I started really digging into: what am I afraid of? … Disappointment. Whose disappointment? [I] just kept going layer by layer, and it came back to like this basically mirror of me, of a different version of me who was younger, who was basically standing there being like, I don’t know my place in this world.” —Aishwarya Iyer, Brightland Olive Oil founder
Iyer’s process of peeling back a fear of failure led her to understand herself more deeply, and the ability to address the root of her fear gave her the necessary understanding to run a successful company.
5. “The chances of failure are huge. And to jump in there, you really need to say, Hey, I have a real chance at success here. And that’s when you can say, all right, I’m going all in on this. And really going all in on it.” —Richard Lee, CEO of pickleball equipment and apparel company Joola
Richard Lee’s explanation of the double-edged sword of failure and success helps reframe the fear of failure as a possibility of its opposite. Even if you fear failure, you can still shoot for greater success.
6. “If it fails, it’s not the worst thing that’s gonna happen. … We’ll find another job.” —Matt Fiedler, CEO of Vinyl Me, Please
As the CEO and co-founder of a popular subscription-based vinyl-membership company, Fiedler’s reframing of stakes evokes an understanding of failure as a likelihood or a possibility, but not as an endpoint.
7. “It’s OK if you try it and it fails, or you try and you realize this isn’t for me. But it’s not OK to not try. Like it’s really, really not OK to not try. Don’t be OK with not trying. I’ve been OK with not trying for a while for a lot of different things. And it didn’t get me anything.” —Shanae Jones, founder of Flyest tea company
More than a century after Theodore Roosevelt said the wise words, “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed,” the sentiment still rings true.
8. “I hate failing publicly, but I had to just accept that that’s part of the process.” —James Hoffman, coffee expert, YouTuber, and entrepreneur
9. “Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.” —Robert T. Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad
10. “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” —Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company
11. “Colleagues should take care of each other, have fun, celebrate success, learn by failure, look for reasons to praise not to criticize, communicate freely, and respect each other.” —Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group
12. “Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.” —Zig Ziglar, motivational speaker, author, and sales expert
13. “Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” —Denis Waitley, motivational speaker, author, and success coach
14. “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” —Napoleon Hill, self-help author
15. “Within every adversity is an equal or greater benefit. Within every problem is an opportunity. Even in the knocks of life, we can find great gifts.” —Napoleon Hill, self-help author
16. “It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” —Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft
17. “Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” —Dale Carnegie, author and teacher
18. “Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.” —Charles F. Kettering, inventor and Head of Research at General Motors
Failure quotes FAQ
What is a famous quote about failure?
Failing is a universal experience, especially among successful people, so there are countless inspirational quotes about failure. One that has endured the test of time is from prolific inventor Thomas Edison, who said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Why is failure inspiring?
With the right understanding, life’s failures teach lessons that lead to later success. So seeing the failures of others and their ability and courage to move past them can be inspiring.
How do you accept failure gracefully?
There are a few ways to accept failure with grace. Understanding failures as powerful lessons, choosing not to dwell on them, and contextualizing misses as a necessary part of taking shots are all ways to accept failures not as career-ending embarrassments, but as stepping stones on the path to success.
