Many of the world’s successful people were once failures. Here are the stories of a few of them.   

Michael Jordan (born 1963) is one of the greatest basketball players of all time. However, he himself admits that it hasn’t been easy. In a famous advertisement for Nike, he says, “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted（委托） to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921. However, he wasn’t always considered a “genius”. He didn’t speak until he was four, and couldn’t read until he was seven. His teachers and parents thought he was slow, and he was expelled（开除）from school. He later famously said, “Success is failure in progress”

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was one of America’s greatest leaders, taking the country through the Civil War（美国南北战争）. However, his life was never easy. He started numerous business that failed, he went bankrupt（破产）twice and was defeated in 26 campaigns（竞选）for public office. He later said, “My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”

J.K. Rowling (born 1965) is the author of the hugely successful Harry Potter books, and one of the richest women in the world. But before publishing the books, she was penniless, depressed and trying to raise a child on her own. In a speech at Harvard in 2008, she said, “I had failed so greatly. After a short-lived marriage, I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.”

So you see, just keep going!

Leonardo da Vinci（莱奥纳多·达·芬奇）was a famous artist who was born in Italy. He was also a great inventor. Many of his inventions have become important in modern life. Although Leonardo hated war, he invented many different machines used for war. His most special invention was the machine gun, which was produced and used in war. Besides, Leonardo spent days thinking about how to save time. He developed ideas for something like cutting machines.

Leonardo was a strange man. He never ate meat. That was very unusual in those times (时代). He never published (发表) scientific discoveries. He usually used mirror writing, which looks like usual writing in a mirror, starting from the right side of the page and moving to the left side.

Only a few of his paintings are left today. Many paintings were not finished because he thought they were not perfect.

Leonardo was talented and creative. He was regarded as one of the most intelligent men in the world.

Alexander Graham Bell was a British man who was a teacher to people who could not hear. He was born in Edinburgh , Scotland in 1847 and went to school in Edinburgh and London. People who cannot hear any sounds at all are called deaf people, and Alexander became interested in helping them to learn to speak. He taught people how to use their mouths to make the sounds needed for talking.

Bell’s family moved to Canada in 1870 and to the USA in 1871. For several years he taught the people who could not speak in Boston( 波士顿). But at the same time he was developing a way to use electricity to send the sounds of talking along a wire(电线), and he made the first telephone in June, 1875. He worked hard in his workshop for six months with his helper Tom Watson. Finally , he spoke these famous words slowly into the telephone, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” And Watson came to him.

The telephone developed quickly in the USA over the next few years. The Bell Telephone Company started in 1877, and in 1878 the first telephone centre was built in New York. More than 150, 000 people had telephones in their homes ten years later. Alexander Graham Bell was a kind man and spent much of his money and time during the rest of his life helping deaf people . In 1922 he died in Canada.