Sylvester Stallone describes his path from poverty in New York, where he taught himself to write by practicing daily like a muscle, to creating Rocky. He says you must fail 100 times to succeed once, and that true learning comes only through failure, not success.
Good morning, Believe Nation! Today's message is you can only learn through— wah! Okay. Failure. Over to you, Sylvester Stallone.
Give up something to get something. And I thought, I didn't have any money, so I had no phone. I painted my windows black, so I didn't know if the sun was up, the sun was down. All I knew is I had to write. And I wrote, and I wrote. It was very bad. It wasn't good at all. But every day it was getting better and better, like a machine, like a muscle, until finally the idea for Rocky came. So the idea is you must fail 100 times to succeed once. It's— that's part of it. No one succeeds the first time. It's learning how to to not get disappointed with failure, to understand failure. You only learn when you fail. You don't learn when you succeed. You know, you're too— "São professores." But when you fail, that's when you learn. So that's how I learned. By— lucky I was a failure in New York, and that is the reason I started writing, which made me successful.
So I'm not sure I would go as far to say that you can only learn through failure, but I've definitely learned a lot of my greatest lessons through the failures in my business. And it's failure and learning not just about business, but learning about myself as a human being and how to get better. I remember in my first company, it was a software company, and we failed day in and day out, and I was making less money than I would if I was on welfare. And through that, learned a lot about how to be a successful entrepreneur and what doesn't work. Even on this YouTube channel, I've done a lot of things that we've tried and failed at, and it didn't work, but we're willing to test. Even what we're doing right now, we've never done a walking video video with this new camera on the channel. This is the first time we're doing it. It may be great, it may turn out to be terrible, but we're going to put it up and try anyway. So many people are so afraid to try that they don't do anything. They're so afraid to fail that they don't take that first step. And so don't fear failure. It's normal. It's going to happen. You're going to suck at things. That's part of the growing process. Continue to reach out, continue to try, and don't get so attached to it working the first time that you don't even go out and give it a shot. So my question of the day for you today is, what's the biggest lesson that you have learned through failure? Leave in the comments below. And I guess a second question, what did you think about the walking video? Should we keep it? Should we do it again? How can we make it better? Let me know. Thank you guys for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso.
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