• Home
  • The Book
  • The Author
  • Events
  • The Blog
  • Failures Within
  • Contact

Seek to Misconstrue   + a

Failure: The Blog  

October 2012

  • 'Goldeneye' Creators Had Almost No Experience
  • Flushing Away an Enormous Problem
  • The Little Lie About the Biggest Mountain
  • You Should Unfriend 10 People on Facebook
  • Inventor of Most Popular Guitar Could Not Play Guitar
  • TV Show Star And High School Dropout

September 2012

  • In Praise of Mediocrity
  • The Failure to Patent a Billion Dollar Formula
  • This Bus Stop is a Fake
  • [VIDEO] A Hollywood Camera Move Made From Junk
  • Productivity Through Self Denial?
  • Harvard Business Review: Get Ready to Fail

August 2012

  • The Innovative Power of Lying
  • [VIDEO] You're Not That Great
  • The Failure of a Great Singer
  • James Cameron was Homeless
  • Something Worse Than Failure
  • Jackie Chan and the Plan to Fail
  • On Failure and Baseball

July 2012

  • Failure on the Radio
  • Complaint Calls Can Be Useful
  • The Terribly Useful Terrible Movie
  • FedEx's Big Gamble (No, Really)
  • Positive Fail, Dot Com
  • How Boring Attire Wins

June 2012

  • [VIDEO] Failing to Success / Harvard Business Review
  • Sly Stallone's Failures
  • The Secret Purpose of Computer Solitaire

[More archives...]

« In Praise of Mediocrity
Inventor of Most Popular Guitar Could Not Play Guitar »

TV Show Star And High School Dropout

October 2nd, 2012 - 1 Comment »

Every week, seven million viewers tune in to watch Rick Harrison on Pawn Stars. He’s a high school dropout.

This information comes from the celebrity news site Starcasm, which references Harrison’s new autobiography.:

He dropped out of high school in the 10th grade, and that he has an insatiable love of books and thirst for knowledge. If only more high school graduates had that last bit.

Rick first fell in love with books when he was eight years old, and began suffering horrific grand mal epileptic seizures. He feared for his life, and after he had one he’s been laid up in bed for about ten days. During that time, he feasted on books.

unnamed

Long time readers of the Failure Book Blog may recognize this story. It sounds like what happened to another Hollywood legend. That man is Martin Scorsese, who suffered from asthma as a child.

Countless successes grow out of failure early in life. The concert violinist Itzhak Perlman contracted polio at the age of 4. President Bill Clinton grew up watching his mother be abused—and later passed the Violence Against Women Act.  Jack London, Louis Armstrong, H.G. Wells and many more dropped out of high school. Failure is the secret to success.

That’s not to say that you should quit school, leave a job or wish for a debilitating illness. But rather, that adversity is what makes success meaningful and possible. Don’t fear failure. Instead: embrace it.

Share on Twitter
Share on TumblrSubmit to redditShare via email

Related Posts

  1. Show Up Uninvited, Get Hired
    Usually, when we tell candidates “thanks, but no thanks” they move on to other job opportunities. But for one company, showing up anyway led to a new career.
  2. It’s Cool to Fail
    We know, we love failure. Apparently screwing up is now in style just about everywhere.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.sandfordhighschool.com/ Ged Online

    I’ve taught for 25 years and have a MA in education. There are rich and
    poor kids at my school. My observation of the last 25 years is that
    rich parents won’t put up with their kid being a failure and early on
    have instilled the importance of education into the kid. Dropping out
    is not even thought of in these kids, but rather how high I can push my
    GPA/Class Rank/SAT/ACT so I can move on to a big name school and make
    major money like my folks have. My poorer kids often don’t have that.
    They don’t do homework, behave, study for tests, parents don’t show up
    for open house, they fight, are lazy, their attendance is often bad, in
    short they don’t do what it takes to be successful. Not every single
    one, but many of them, a complete “class” difference in how you handle
    school. If you don’t pay attention and you don’t do your homework and
    you fail your test, that’s on you, not the school. Let me go one step
    further. If you look at how much money a parent makes and their level
    of education and compare it to the kids SAT score, there is a totally
    direct correlation between the two.


© Copyright 2009-2013 Robby Slaughter - All Rights Reserved • Theme from Web Considerations, LLC