Long before the iPhone made him the god of gadgets, Steve
Jobs launched his tech career by hacking land lines to make free long-distance
calls. Bob Dylan’s band, the Golden Chords, lost a high-school talent
competition to a tap dancing act. Behind every success story is an embarrassing
first effort, a stumble, a setback or a radical change of direction. It’s these
first clumsy steps on the road to fame and fortune that fascinate writer Seth
Fiegerman, who edits the blog OpeningLines.org, a collection of case studies on
the origins of famous careers. "When you see someone who’s very
successful, you almost imagine that it was an inevitable conclusion, that
they’re a genius, that they were destined for great things," says Fiegerman, who
began the blog in 2009, after an early setback in his own career. "I think the
big takeaway is failure and setbacks, far from being uncommon, are in
many ways essential." After Fiegerman, now 26, graduated from
New York University in 2008, he landed a first job as a research editor at
Playboy magazine. But he had worked there for just half a year when management
announced that most of the staff would soon be laid off. As unemployment loomed,
Fiegerman felt adrift. He began to explore the Playboy archives, discovering a
valuable wealth of interviews with celebrities ranging from Marion Brando to
Malcolm X. Many of these successful people shared tales of their less promising
early days, and Fiegerman quickly became obsessed with these origin
stories. He began reading biographies with great interest and
requesting interviews with writers and musicians he admired, using the blog to
document the fits and starts that began the careers of the famous and the
infamous. Success, he learned, was less a matter of innate talent and more the
product of perseverance, a willingness to stumble and stand up again and
again. "You kind of assume that great geniuses are like
Mozart," Fiegerman says. But few successful people were children of highly
unusual talent and these children don’t necessarily find success. "Most people
don’t stick to it." Like his subjects, Fiegerman found that his
own early setback wasn’t permanent. He landed a new job in journalism, and today
he works at the tech news website Mashable, covering, appropriately enough,
start-up businesses. While he has less time for the blog, he hopes his
collection of origin stories will help other young people realize it’s OK to
fail. According to Fiegerman, which of the following is critical to success
A. Intelligence.
B. Persistence.
C. Opportunity.
D. Patience.