Failures
Raised in rural central Pennsylvania, hampered by the lack of a formal education and nearly bankrupt by the time he was 30, Milton S. Hershey went on to become not only one of America’s wealthiest individuals, but also a successful entrepreneur whose products are known the world over, a visionary builder of the town that bears his name and a philanthropist whose open-hearted generosity continues to touch the lives of thousands. Following a four-year apprenticeship as a teenager to a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, candy maker, Hershey in 1876 attempted to start his own candy business in Philadelphia. Despite six years of hard work, it failed. So he moved to Denver and found work with a confectioner who taught him how to make caramels using fresh milk. He then started up a second candy business in New York City. It also failed. Hershey’s success was not simply a matter of luck. Having learned from his past failures, he had become a shrewd and astute businessman. It took years of trial and error (which can be read as years of failing to find the right recipe) to discover the recipe for the chocolate so many enjoy today. Mr. Hershey left many legacies including his school but could his greatest legacy be inspiration to keep going to those who have experienced a failure?
Read more about this topic: Milton S. Hershey
Famous quotes containing the word failures:
“We must choose. Be a child of the past with all its crudities and imperfections, its failures and defeats, or a child of the future, the future of symmetry and ultimate success.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“Maybe it’s understandable what a history of failures America’s foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America’s miniature schnauzer—a noisy but small and useless part of the national household.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)