If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try, Try Again…
Dawn F. Landry
I help business professionals and organizations to identify, hone, and articulate their value. The value that they bring externally, internally, and most of all to themselves.
Does it feel like you’re doing all the right things but aren’t seeing any results? Are you close to throwing in the towel and calling it quits?
This one is for anyone who needs a little inspiration. Don’t give up?????it’s an endurance test. If you’re not succeeding yet, it may be an indication that you need to try, try, try again as the proverb says. *
Now we know American male success stories which include Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, and Steve Jobs, etc. However, I would like to highlight examples of noted female inventors who kept trying despite the odds. These include:
Sarah Breedlove – who later would come to be known as Madam C. J. Walker – was born on December 23, 1867, on the same Delta, Louisiana plantation where her parents, Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove, had been enslaved before the end of the Civil War.?This child of sharecroppers transformed herself from an uneducated farm laborer and laundress into one of the twentieth century’s most successful, self-made women entrepreneurs.
By early 1910, she had settled in Indianapolis, then the nation’s largest inland manufacturing center, where she built a?factory , hair and manicure salon, and a training school. Less than a year after her arrival, Walker grabbed national headlines in the black press when she contributed $1,000 to the building fund of the “colored” YMCA in Indianapolis.
In 1912, Walker said, “I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations… I have built my own factory on my own ground.”
In 2008, Jamie Kern Lima co-founded IT Cosmetics after having difficulties with makeup products due to?rosacea ?and?hyperpigmentation .?The business struggled over the following years as beauty retailers rejected her products. She was featured on a 10-minute?QVC ?segment in which she wiped her makeup off, revealing her bare face to illustrate the use of IT Cosmetics concealers. All products sold out by the end of the segment.
By 2015, the company had more than $182 million in net sales.?It was acquired by L’Oréal for $1.2 billion in 2016.?She remained with the company upon the acquisition and was the first female chief executive officer of a L’Oréal brand. In August 2019, Kern Lima announced on?Instagram ?that she would be leaving the company.?Kern Lima has been included on the Forbes’ list of “America’s Richest Self-Made Women” since 2017.
In 1990, after growing frustrated with ordinary mops, Joy Mangano developed her first invention, the Miracle Mop, a self-wringing plastic mop with a head made from a continuous loop of 300 feet (90 meters) of cotton that can be easily wrung out without getting the user’s hands wet. With her own savings and investments from family and friends, she made a prototype and manufactured 1,000 units.?Early assembly was done in her father’s body shop in?Peconic ?in 1991.
After selling the mop at trade shows and in local stores on Long Island, she sold 1,000 units on consignment to?QVC .?It sold modestly at first, but once QVC allowed Mangano to go on-air to sell it herself, she sold 18,000 mops in less than a half hour. By the year 2000, the company was selling $10 million worth of Miracle Mops per year. Today, Mangano is a named inventor of 71 patent families and 126 distinct patent publications?for her inventions.
What’s one common element in all these stories? They have Tigger-like characteristics.
Can you identify your Tigger strengths? If you’re struggling, then consider these three tips:
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For further Tigger encouragement, consider that:
The WD-40 name comes from the fact that the formula represents the?40th attempt ?to create a degreaser and rust protection solvent. Although it was originally used in the aerospace industry, it became so popular among employees that it was packaged into aerosol cans and introduced to retail in 1958.
But what if the lab had called it quits after 39 tries?
Marc Chavannes and Al Fielding created bubble wrap in 1960 in an attempt to create a?trendy new textured wallpaper . This was a total failure, as was a later attempt to market it as housing insulation. When the wrap was eventually used by?IBM ?to package a newly launched computer during transport, it suddenly became an overnight success. Today, few people even realize that bubble wrap began as an abject failure.
Pacemakers used to be huge – the size of televisions. Then?Wilson Greatbach ?made a mistake that revolutionized medicine. When building a heart rhythm recording device, he pulled out the wrong sized resistor and plugged it into the circuit. When it was installed, he realized it sounded like a human heartbeat. With some work, he miniaturized the device to two cubic inches. The result was an implantable pacemaker, which has since saved thousands of lives. **
What these stories prove is that to survive defeat takes patience.
Yet, I don’t know about you, but patience is no virtue of mine. It’s an area that I have worked on for (gulp) now five decades. I’m better than I used to be but nowhere near “there” on my journey.
I do recognize that life’s delays, valleys, and speedbumps don’t last forever. However, they do cause me to slow down just long enough to reset and strategically plan for the next great thing.
My advice: Keep it up. Your greatest achievements may be just around the corner!
Email me at?[email protected] ?with any questions or if I may be a resource to you.
NOTE: This is a topic that I cover in my online course,?BD Dynamics. Check it out at?www.bddynamics.com .?