Clarity is Power-Part 1

In 1938, when Soichiro Honda took his first working sample of piston ring to Toyota, they rejected stating the samples were not up to their standards. Rather than focusing on the failure, he continued to work on the goal. After two years of redesigning, he finally won a contract with Toyota. He built a factory to commence production, which was bombed and destroyed due to world war. He rebuilt a new factory which was brought down into rubble’s by earth quake. Honda was not a man who would accept failure as a possibility. Recession and depression caused by the war had extreme gasoline shortage in Japan. So people resorted to walking and cycling. Honda designed a tiny engine and attached it to his bicycle. His neighbors too wanted one of those motorized cycles from him. He was not able to meet the demand. So he built a plant and manufactured his motor cycle ‘The Super Cub’ which earned him the emperor’s award. Today, Honda Corporation employs 100,000 people. Why? Honda never considered the failure as the end.
Great people became great people because of the way they dealt with failures and setbacks in life. At every fall they refused to remain fallen. They refused to quit. They refused to give up. They refused to accept a ‘No’ from life. “their greatest glory” in the words of swami Chinmayanand, “was not in never falling, but in rising every time they fall.”
The newspaper editor fired him because he had no good ideas. A pastor employed him to draw canvassing material for the church. He was allowed to stay in the backyard of a mouse infested church garage. One of those mice inspired the man so much that Mickey Mouse was born, and Walt Disney was revealed to the world. Walt Disney epitomized what Churchill preached, “Never, never, never, never, never, never give up.”
Chester Carlson’s idea was rejected by over 20 corporations and after seven long years rejections that idea was unfolded to the world as Xerox Corporation. Colonel Harland D Sanders heard 1009 ‘No’s to his proposal of a good chicken recipe before he heard the first ‘Yes’, and the multimillion-dollar KFC corporation was born.

To be continued…