Einstein, the man that we all know as one of the most brilliant minds to have ever lived, was once considered a major failure. In fact, he didn’t speak until he was 4 years old and failed the entrance examination of the Swiss Federal Polytechnic school.

While he did graduate from university, he struggled and nearly dropped out, doing very poorly during the course of his studies there. In fact, he was in such dire straits that even his father considered him to be a major failure. It left young Einstein completely heartbroken.

After graduating, he was unsure of what to do with his life. He ended up taking a job as an insurance salesman and an assistant at the Patent Office.

Yet, this is the man who later persisted and brought us the theory of relativity, with groundbreaking work done in physics and mathematics. He helped us to reach deeper understandings of how the universe works. By developing several fundamental core laws governing physics, Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921 and created the beginnings of quantum theory.

One of the most famed authors of modern times, Dickinson largely considered herself a failure for much of her life. As an introvert, she was reluctant to embrace many face-to-face relationships. She led a rather reclusive life for much of her years, being called reclusive and eccentric by the locals who had come to know her.

She spent much of her time writing poems about dystopian subjects such as life and death, but also wrote vehemently about immortality. While Dickinson became one of the most renowned poets in history, less than a dozen poems were actually published during her lifetime. And, when poems were published, they were usually altered significantly because their style departed so much from the norm of the day with their lack of titles and odd capitalization and punctuation throughout.

Dickinson might have been categorized as a failure during her lifetime. It was likely due to her reluctance to meet or correspond with many people about her work. After her death, however, her sister discovered a significant cache of poems totalling upwards of 1,800 that were eventually published, helping her to ultimately gain international notoriety and fame.

Ford was the industrialist who started Ford Motor Company, which has been one of the most profitable automotive companies in the world over the years, making him one of the richest and famous individuals. However, while Ford celebrated many successes later on in life, he also failed often in his earlier years.

In fact, it wasn’t until 1891, when Ford was 28-years old, that he decided to become an engineer, working for the Edison Illuminating Company. It was around this time when he started experimenting with gasoline engines.

7 years later, Ford designed and built a self-propelled vehicle that he showed off to people, winning the backing of William H. Murphy and founded the Detroit Automobile Company a year later. However, the company failed, in 1901, after an inability to pay back a loan to the Dodge brothers and due to inefficiencies in the design of the vehicle.

The company ceased operations, dealing a stealthy blow to Ford. However, Ford convinced one of these partners to give him another chance. With mounting pressure, it was agreed that he would try again. But after disagreements, this venture also flopped.

Ford gave it one final shot in 1903 at the age of 40-years old, after two separate failures, and incorporated the Ford Motor Company. After the failures, Ford found an unconventional backer and tried again. The Ford name is then synonymous with the automobile and a brand that was affordable by the everyday family. He developed something that becomes the largest boon in the automotive industry with cars everywhere.

J.K. Rowling, one of the most famous and renowned former failures of our time, is the author of the widely-popular Harry Potter series of books. She grew up with a tumultuous childhood that included a difficult and strained relationship with her father while dealing with the illness of her mother.

At the age of 17, she attempted to gain acceptance to Oxford University. She failed and was rejected. Instead, she received her Bachelor of Arts in French and Classics at the University of Exeter.

However, it was just a few short months after that her mother died from Multiple Sclerosis, leaving her extremely distraught and upset. In the wake of her mother’s death, only a few months afterwards, she moved to Portugal to teach English. There, she met a man, got married, got pregnant, and gave birth to her daughter. The relationship was a very strenuous one, with reports of domestic abuse resulting in a divorce.

With only three chapters of Harry Potter completed, at the end of 1993, when she was at the age of 38, she considered herself a major failure.

She had failed at just about everything she had ever attempted to do in life. She was diagnosed with clinical depression and was suicidal. Two years later, in 1995, five years after the initial idea had come to her, she managed to finish the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. She located an agent, but after one year of getting it published, all 12 major publishing houses had rejected her book.

It wasn’t until 1996, when a small literary house in London named, Bloomsbury, gave the green light and a very small advance of £1500, only due to the behest of the owner’s daughter, that the book was published. In 1997, seven years after the initial idea for the young wizard, the first Harry Potter book was published. The author of the hugely successful Harry Potter series has had anything but a smooth ride. By 2004, Rowling had become the first author to become a billionaire through book writing, according to Forbes.

Katy Perry is an American singer and songwriter best known for her hit, I Kissed a Girl. Perry experienced a seemingly sudden rise to fame. In fact, Perry experienced numerous heart-wrenching failures on the path before she ever became a household name.

In her childhood, she lived in poverty, having to use food stamps just to get by. From an early age, she realized that things weren’t easily obtained, and that she would have to work hard for it, something that clearly stuck with her through the failures.

Growing up, she and her siblings listened to Gospel music often. At the age of 13, she was gifted a guitar, and shortly thereafter, she began performing the songs that she wrote using that very guitar.

In 1999, at the age of 15, she dropped out of high school in order to pursue music full time. She moved to Tennessee where she signed with Red Hill Records and debuted a Gospel record at the age of 17-years old. It sold only 200 copies before the label ceased its operations a few months later.

At the age of 20-years old, she signed with another label called Java to work on her solo record. However, the record was shelved. Afterwards, Perry signed with Columbia Records, and recorded new music over the next two years. But before the record was completed, she was dropped from that label as well.

When she released the would-be-hit song, I Kissed a Girl, Perry was 24-years old. What seemed like an overnight success actually took 9 years to accomplish from the time that she had dropped out of high school.

"All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all the troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me. You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you."

Walt Disney is an extraordinarily successful creative animator, filmmaker and theme park developer who reinvented entertainment in the 20th century and beyond. Yet, his road to success was paved by an unhappy childhood along with countless business failures and setbacks.

His father was a domineering figure who was abusive. To escape from his stressful circumstances, Disney found solace in drawing. Still, his older brothers, one by one, ran off from home to escape their father. Soon, he followed.

His first cartoon business went bankrupt. With the loss of his first business, Disney packed his bags, and with just $40 to his name, took off to Los Angeles to try his hand at acting. But he failed at that, too.

Later, by noticing there weren't any animations studios in California, Disney found his first major success with the creation of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

Disney finally brought Mickey Mouse to life on film starting in the late 1920s and earned his way back to the top of his industry. But it wasn't easy. Bankers rejected the concept of his famous mouse over 300 times before one said yes.

Not only was he overworked, but tensions with his employer led to Disney having a nervous breakdown. Disney returned with a bold new idea by developing a full-length animation – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) followed by Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940) and Bambi (1942). It was Walt’s unwavering resilience that helped him through the many setbacks.

Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, is something for the history books. However, Jordan is credited with once saying, "I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 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."

At the age of 15, Jordan was passed up for the varsity basketball team, instead of being assigned to the junior varsity team. He cried after he saw that list without his name on it. But instead of giving up, his mom convinced him to push forward.

He was able to take failure in stride. He allowed it to push him rather than to entirely defeat him. At the age of 21, he entered the NBA as a professional basketball player for the Chicago Bulls, where he would go on to win six championship titles and become one of the most impactful players to ever grace the courts.

Steve Jobs was an iconic billionaire, inventor and entrepreneur responsible for one of the most renowned and successful companies to have ever been created — Apple Computers. Yet, Jobs’ life was filled with failures before fame ever graced him.

In his earliest days, Jobs felt unwanted. He was put up for adoption by his mother and was raised by a blue-collar couple in California. He dropped out of college and started taking the courses that were most interesting to him. Afterwards, he opted to travel around the world.

In 1976, Jobs co-founded Apple Computers with his friend, Steve Wozniak. The company was highly successful. However, after a disagreement with John Scully, whom Jobs hired as a CEO from Pepsi, Jobs resigned from Apple and quit, taking 5 employees with him to start his new business venture, NeXT.

That disheartening period helped to embolden Jobs. While Apple was fledgling and would eventually be on the verge of bankruptcy, NeXT thrived. Eventually, NeXT was acquired by Apple in 1997, bringing him back into the fold of a now-struggling company.

The Beatles, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, were an English rock group considered to be one of the most popular musical groups in history with a sell of over 1.6 billion records worldwide.

However, The Beatles once considered themselves failures. They got criticized as a group that "would never succeed" and the "guitar groups were on their way out".

While others might have already gotten discouraged during the rejections and the failures faced by the group, they didn’t falter. They didn’t throw in that proverbial towel while they knew deep down inside that they were bound to be famous and that it was just a matter of time as long as they didn’t give up.

Winston Churchill is famously known as being the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Churchill applied to attend the Royal Military College in Sandhurst. He failed the exam twice until having his third try by changing from the infantry division to the cavalry division, which had a lower threshold for entrance. However, he excelled during his tenure there.

During his political career, he lost a total of 5 elections. Throughout his life, he battled clinical depression. He also had a severe lateral lisp, and had trouble speaking and making speeches at times.

However, Churchill was also one of the most successful and renowned politicians to have ever lived. He was often credited with several very popular quotes about failure, such as "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts,” and, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."