Famous failures, counted

Most lists of famous failures give you a feeling. This one gives you a number, because the number is the part that helps. When you know a publisher said no thirty times to a book you have on your shelf, your own four rejections stop looking like a verdict.

Every entry below is a count of attempts that did not work. Not an age, not a hard year. Where the number is disputed, it says so.

Business

James Dyson, 5,126 prototypes. He built 5,127 versions of the bagless vacuum over five years. The first 5,126 failed. He has said in interviews that he was in debt for most of that time and that his wife's salary paid the bills.

Howard Schultz, 217 investors. Raising money for what became Starbucks, he pitched 242 people and 217 said no. He kept a list.

Melanie Perkins, 100 investors. Canva was turned down by more than a hundred investors across three years of trips to Silicon Valley. She was in her early twenties and had no technical background.

Brian Chesky, 800 boxes of cereal. Before Airbnb worked, he and his co-founders printed Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's cereal boxes and sold about 800 of them to keep the company alive. Seven investors had already passed that summer.

Jack Ma, 30 job applications. He was rejected for around thirty jobs after university, including one at KFC, where he has said he was the only one of twenty-four applicants turned away. He was also rejected by Harvard ten times.

Phil Knight, 1,300 pairs of shoes. In the first year of what became Nike, he sold about 1,300 pairs out of the boot of his car at track meets. Revenue was 8,000 dollars.

Jeff Bezos, 170 million dollars. Amazon wrote off 170 million on unsold Fire Phones in one quarter of 2014. The phone was discontinued within a year.

Reed Hastings, 50 million dollars. In 2000 he offered to sell Netflix to Blockbuster for 50 million. The meeting is widely reported to have ended in laughter. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy ten years later.

Rovio, 51 games. The Finnish studio released 51 games over six years and was close to insolvency when the fifty-second, Angry Birds, came out.

Sport

Michael Jordan, 9,000 shots. The number comes from his own Nike advert: more than nine thousand shots missed, almost three hundred games lost, twenty-six times trusted with the last shot and he missed. He was also left off his high school varsity team at fifteen.

Kobe Bryant, 14,481 shots. He missed more field goals than any player in NBA history. He held the record when he retired and said he was proud of it.

Cy Young, 316 losses. The most losses of any pitcher who has ever played. He also has the most wins. The award for the best pitcher in baseball carries his name.

Babe Ruth, 1,330 strikeouts. For decades he held the strikeout record alongside the home run record.

Tom Brady, 198 players. A hundred and ninety-eight players were taken before him in the 2000 draft. Six quarterbacks among them.

Peyton Manning, 251 interceptions. He threw more interceptions than all but a handful of quarterbacks in history, and more touchdowns than almost anyone.

Lionel Messi, 31 penalties. He has missed around thirty-one penalties in his career, more than any other active player, and kept taking them.

Writing

Jack London, 600 rejection slips. He said he collected six hundred rejections before selling his first story, and kept them on a spike above his desk.

Louis L'Amour, 200 rejections. Two hundred rejections before a sale. He went on to publish more than a hundred books.

Stephen King, 30 publishers. Carrie was rejected around thirty times. He threw the manuscript in the bin and his wife Tabitha took it out.

James Patterson, 31 publishers. His first novel was turned down thirty-one times before it was published and won an Edgar Award.

Dr. Seuss, 27 publishers. His first book was rejected by around twenty-seven publishers. He has said he was walking home to burn the manuscript when he ran into an old classmate who had just become an editor.

John Grisham, 28 publishers. A Time to Kill was rejected by more than two dozen publishers and around fifteen agents.

Tim Ferriss, 25 publishers. The 4-Hour Workweek was rejected twenty-five times before one publisher took it.

Stephenie Meyer, 14 agents. Fourteen agents either said no or never answered. One said yes.

Beatrix Potter, 250 copies. After every publisher she approached said no, she printed 250 copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit herself and gave them to friends. Frederick Warne changed their mind the following year.

Arianna Huffington, 36 publishers. Her second book was rejected thirty-six times.

Film and music

Sylvester Stallone, 25 dollars. Broke and unable to pay rent, he sold his dog Butkus for twenty-five dollars. He wrote Rocky soon after and bought the dog back for a reported 15,000 once the film sold.

Tyler Perry, 30 people. Thirty people came to his first play. He staged it for six years to near-empty rooms before one run sold out.

Bruce Springsteen, 25,000 copies. His first album sold about twenty-five thousand copies in its first year and his label considered dropping him.

Walt Disney, 300 bankers. The figure usually given for the banks that turned down Disneyland is around three hundred. It is repeated everywhere and is hard to verify precisely, so treat it as folklore with a real shape: he was refused repeatedly and remortgaged his house.

Science

Katalin Karikó, 30 years. Three decades of rejected grant applications for messenger RNA. She was demoted in 1995 and kept working on it anyway. The technology became the covid vaccines and she shared the Nobel Prize in 2023.

What the numbers are for

Read a list like this once and it is entertainment. The useful version is the one where you write your own number down and keep it visible, because the count changes what a single rejection means. On its own it feels like an answer. As number nineteen of an unknown total, it is just Tuesday.

That is the whole idea behind this club. Everyone who joins puts their count next to their name, and the number goes up in public when an attempt fails. The application asks you for yours.