FAMOUS FAILURES

It is a common fact that many success stories, both past and present, have at one point experienced failure.  Failure comes in all shapes and sizes, and not even the greatest entrepreneurs, thinkers, entertainers, and inventors are except from this concept.  Below are some famous figures throughout history that have walked through failure and emerged as successful. 

Bill Gates: Famously known as the founder and CEO of tech empire "Microsoft", Bill Gates did not realize he was destined for greatness when he dropped out of Harvard and his first business "Traf-O-Data" failed miserably. 

Albert Einstein: Besides having his name being synonymous with the term "genius", Albert Einstein's accomplishments include developing the theory of relativity, winning a Nobel Prize, and changing the face of physics forever. What many people do not know is that Einstein did not speak for the first four years of his life, did not learn to read until he was seven, was expelled from school, and even refused admittance into the Zurich Polytechnic School.

Richard Branson: The free-spirited founder of Virgin Records, Richard could attribute his success to his marks in school, but that would not be the case.  Richard Branson has been diagnosed with Dyslexia ever since he was a child, resulting in very poor grades on standardized tests.  But that was not enough to prevent him from becoming the fourth richest person in Great Britain!

Oprah Winfrey: It is nearly impossible to mention Oprah's name and not think about the success she has amounted.  Oprah has been named "The Most Influential Woman in the World" and has created an empire worth $2.9 Billion!  But Oprah's success did not come without her fair share of failures as well.  Early in her career, Oprah had been demoted from her position as a News Anchor because the producers believed she "wasn't fit for television."

If these four individuals have taught us anything about failure, it that failure is an inevitable reality that affects everyone at some point in their lives, and that we can emerge brighter and stronger than before.  Failure is like the creation of an artist's sculpture. Failure chips away at the block of marble only to reveal the masterpiece that was always inside. 

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WHY THE MOM IS SO AMAZING A FEAT !

Here are 8 reasons why India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) is just amazing according to The Better India :

• The Mangalyaan mission cost India $73 million (~Rs.450 crores) which is even cheaper than an eight lane bridge in Mumbai which cost $340 million. It is less than the budget of film “Gravity” which was about $105 million and about one-tenth of what the US has spent on MAVEN, making it undoubtedly the most cost-effective inter-planetary space mission to have ever been undertaken anywhere in the world!

• In real terms, when distributed over the population of 1.2 billion, every Indian has contributed Rs.4 per towards the mission.

• Mangalyaan will observe the environment of Mars and look for various elements like methane (marsh gas), which is a possible indicator of life. It will also look for Deuterium-Hydroden ratio and other neutral constants.

• The orbiter weighs 1,350-kg, which is even less than the weight of an average sports utility vehicle.

• The manufacturing of Mangalyaan took 15 months while NASA took five years to complete MAVEN.

• Mangalyaan is the first spacecraft to be launched outside the Earth’s sphere of influence by ISRO in its entire history of 44 years.

• ISRO will be the fourth space agency in the world after National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the US, Russian Federal Space Agency (RFSA) and European Space Agency to have successfully undertaken a mission to Mars.

• Considering that Mars is about 670 million kilometers from the Earth, the cost of the ride works out to about Rs.6.7 per kilometre – cheaper than what even autorickshaws charge anywhere in India!

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A TALE OF TWO WAYS OF THINKING

In 2012, an international team of scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Swiss/French border announced they had demonstrated the existence of the elusive Higgs Boson. This was a monumental effort. It took more than 10,000 scientists ten years to build the LHC and a further four years to reveal the Higgs Boson.

The LHC cost more than $4bn. It is the most complex machine ever built. It creates and accelerates beams of protons around a 27Km ring to within 0.000000009% of the speed of light. To process the vast quantities of data produced as trillions of protons collide each day, the LHC has a network of 100,000 linked computers around the world. The LHC collects and processes data equivalent to the entire Google databank every three days.

Despite this gargantuan effort, the team and LHC are not CERTAIN they have found the Higgs Boson. Their data suggests a 4.9 sigma level of confidence—the chance that they are wrong is one in 2 million.

Meanwhile in a window-less meeting room at an office in Columbia Street, Seattle, five men and two women are discussing a 2 million-year-old fossil hominid found in South Africa. Australopithecus sediba is a candidate for the last link between australopithecines and our genus Homo.

The people at this meeting are endowed with a certainty the scientists at the LHC lack. They are 100% CERTAIN the truth is to be found in a book written between 2 - 4 thousand years ago by people who lacked scientific instruments, who knew nothing about the size of the universe and nothing about the composition of matter. They did not even know the shape of the Earth. Their most advanced technological achievement was a bronze sword.

But they had something possibly more important—they believed they were the chosen people of a god who created the entire universe in six days.

A tall man with a shock of brown hair picked up a marker pen and turned to the whiteboard, “Ok, let’s get down to business. How do we discredit australopithecus sediba?”

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WHAT IF SATAN IS REAL?

Imagine for a moment, a world in which God and Satan actually exist. God is omnipresent, omnibenevolent and omniscient.

Satan, like God, is a spirit with supernatural powers, including the ability to communicate with people. Satan likes to make life difficult for God and for humans.

In the Bible, God is shown to be an incompetent, jealous, vain, monster who will kill people for the least reason. He had to start the human race twice because he didn’t like how it went the first time. He had to make a second covenant with humans because the first one didn’t work out. He had to rescind many of his laws because they were not good. He was violently jealous of other gods, he wanted living sacrifices and he wanted to be worshiped.

None of these characteristics are compatible with an omnipresent, omnibenevolent and omniscient God. I can see only one way to explain all this.

1. Satan actually inspired the Bible posing as God. He did this to discredit God and confuse humans. This was easy for him—humans have no  

way to distinguish between talking to God and talking to Satan posing as God.

2. God started everything but gave people free-will. He then sat back to allow us to prosper or fail as we will. God let us go—completely.

3. The only being trying to interfere with our free-will is Satan. And the Bible is his masterpiece. He made it so confusing that even Christians cannot agree what it means; from one Christian sect 2,000 years ago there are now around 38,000 denominations.

If I am right, we cannot rely on anything in the Bible. We do not know if there is a heaven or a hell and, if heaven exists, we do not know how to get there.

The best we can do is to ignore the Bible completely and to live our lives helping others and working to make the world a better place for our children to inherit. (Which is probably what God would have told us if he had written the Bible.)

Oddly enough, if God and Satan are both IMAGINARY beings, the same advice works perfectly...

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WHICH PROFESSIONALS ARE THE LEAST TRUSTWORTHY?

1) Pastors

2) Politicians

3) Bankers

4) Plumbers

5) Car salespeople

6) Lawyers

I rate pastors as the least trustworthy because they ALL tell you lies—they have to or they would be out of a job. They say they know things they can’t possibly know and some will threaten you with eternal torture if you doubt them. They are professional liars.

Politicians often lie but, at least, they try to avoid outright lies (it’s embarrassing to be caught out.) Instead, their techniques are to mislead and confuse or not to answer a question whilst pretending to. Magicians practice sleight of hand; politicians practice sleight of mouth!

I put bankers in the third slot. They have won this lofty position with years of cheating and taking money from the public. But, at least, if you ask the             interest rate, they have to tell you the truth—mostly!

Plumbers are in fourth place. The problem with plumbers is that they deal in a black art and most people have no clue whether they are getting good or bad advice. If they say you need a new CH pump, you can either delay everything and get a second opinion or pay up and get your heating working again. It’s easier to pay—even if the real problem is that someone accidentally turned the thermostat down.  Also, they spend a lot of time in your attic. Are they busy saving your CH system from imminent death or are they thumbing through those old copies of Playboy you stashed up there when you were a teenager?

Car sales people are not as bad as they were. Now there are independent ways to check the mileage on second-hand cars and ways to check if it has been written-off in a car wreck. There are also plenty of ways to check the fair price for a car. Sure, you have to haggle with them but that just negotiation and you both know what’s going on.

Lawyers are least untrustworthy in my opinion. Yes, there is a layer of bottom-feeders but most will give you good, honest advice. The biggest issue with lawyers is their tendency to bill you for opening the front door or sitting in one of their chairs. If you check your bill carefully and only use them for things you can’t do yourself, you should get a fair service.

What do you think?

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