Sara Blakely - I heard her on Public Radio. Wow!
Who here DOESN'T own a pair of Spanx? Listening to someone who filled a need and became a billionaire is definitely worth the time.
The most impressive part I gleaned from this blog is how the Blakely children shared-and celebrated-not just successes but failures-that's inspiring. We need to make mistakes in order to learn from mistakes.
1The other day, I was driving around town on a bunch of errands and heard a wonderful interview on National Public Radio. The guest was Sara Blakely, the youngest self-made female billionaire in the history of the United States. Sara is the founder of Spanx - a product that is in my dresser - probably in the dressers of most women of a certain age! !
And I was pretty blown away, to the point that I am back to tweaking by my shiny new business plan. And I'd like to share the part of her talk that really inspired me.
Sara Blakely and I have some things in common. We both got really, really low scores on the LSAT's and sort of gave up on law school. We also both had amazing fathers. But hers did something different, yet oddly empowering!
Most fathers try to inspire their children to succeed. Sara Blakely's dad trained his children to fail.
She said they would sit around the dinner table and he would ask the children about their day. And they would take turns telling the stories of the things they had tried to do, and how they had fallen on their faces. While the Kennedy children shared successes and hid our flops, the Blakely children did the opposite. They would try anything! If it worked, fine, but if they failed, they learned to celebrate the failure with their dad at the dinner table.
As a result, Ms. Blakely came to adulthood having embraced failure - she had learned the important lesson that, if she didn't let herself fail, there would be so many things that she would never try.
And she learned to let herself feel profoundly uncomfortable.
Without risking spectacular failure, you will never achieve spectacular success!
And after listening to her talk about the benefits of risking failure, I totally get it! And I totally get how risk averse I tend to be!
Gave me goosebumps!
If you'd like to hear the interview, it was on Here and Now. Here is the podcast . It's an hour long show, and you can fast forward to "11 Minutes"! Hope you enjoy it!
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