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If at first you don't succeed...
By Helen Beckett
Successful people all suffer setbacks on the way to achieving their goals, although these mistakes never receive as much attention as their eventual success. Mistakes in your career are important opportunities to learn, if you can only see it that way. Take inspiration from a few household names:
Kelly Holmes
When Kelly Holmes won two Olympic track gold medals at the 2004 Athens Olympics, she not only fulfilled her dreams, but she made history. Always a grafter, Holmes never had much sponsorship money to ease her way through athletics so she worked as a nursery assistant, a recreation assistant and as a truck driver in the Army. But she never gave up her dreams, or her focus, and can now add Sports Personality of the Year and the title Dame Kelly to her CV.
Steve Jobs
After co-founding Apple Computer in his garage and enjoying huge success, Steve Jobs was fired from his own company 11 years later. Jobs picked up the pieces and bought a majority share in Pixar in 1986. Nine years later, he won an Oscar for Toy Story and in 1996 he was back at Apple helping them to mould the iPod generation.
Joanne Kathleen (J.K.) Rowling
The author of the smash hit Harry Potter books was let go from a secretarial job after she was caught using the company computer to write stories. But she used her severance pay to write Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, using grant money to finish it after she ran out of cash. The Harry Potter series became a global phenomenon with Hollywood helping to create Rowling’s fortune.
Stelios Haji-Ioannou
Greek shipping magnate and entrepreneur Stelios made his name and multimillion-dollar fortune by launching a series of bargain basement products. The ‘easy’ brand, spanning cheap flights to pizzas, has become more famous than individual products. But Stelios nearly came to grief with his chain of 22 internet cafes in eight countries; they cost him millions of pounds when the ‘dot com’ boom came to an end. Since then Stelios has launched another 13 bright orange branded products.
All these examples show that the most important thing is to get through the denial phase. After a setback you’re likely to feel shocked and betrayed for a while, but you need to accept that only you can get yourself back on your career path. It’s probably best to forget about the blame game and invest your energy in finding a new job.
A redundancy or sacking is a good opportunity to re-evaluate your career. Depending on your notice period, you’ll have some space to think about what aspects of your job turn you on and off. Work out where these might be found in another role or industry that might suit you better.
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