- Mike White - White Lotus
- Hootie ten years label rejections
- twisted sister
- Jo Koy - sometimes you need to hear struggle to success. Netflix didn't want my special. 55mins into special.
- Joan Jett
- JKR - Harry Potter - The veritable empire that is Harry Potter was rejected over ten times by a variety of publishing houses. It was only after one agent’s daughter nagged him into green-lighting the book that it saw the light of day, and become an international sensation.
- "This is typical Berlin hot air. The product is worthless." Letter sent by Heinrich Dreser, head of Bayer's Pharmacological Institute, rejecting Felix Hoffmann's invention of aspirin. At that point, Bayer was standing by its ‘star’ painkiller diacetylmorphine. This alternative drug reportedly made factory workers feel animated and ‘heroic’, which is why Bayer decided to aptly name it ‘heroin’. Later on, due to its ‘funny’ side effects it was decided to take heroin off the market. Bayer's chairman eventually intervened to overrule Dreser's decision and accept aspirin as Bayer's main painkiller. More than 10 billion tablets of aspirin are swallowed annually.
- "Who the hell wants to copy a document on plain paper???!!!" Rejection letter in 1940 to Chester Carlson, inventor of the XEROX machine. In fact, over 20 companies rejected his "useless" idea between 1939 and 1944. Even the National Inventors Council dismissed it. Today, the Rank Xerox Corporation has an annual revenue in the range of one billion dollars.
- "The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible." A Yale university professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to found Federal Express.
- "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olsen (President, Chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp) in 1977.
- "You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight training." Rejection letter to Arthur Jones, who invented the Nautilus Fitness Machine.
- "So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet." Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.
- Even when it’s the top management of your company or your client who ask you to be innovative and expects you to break patterns, it is still wise to keep in mind that they are as conservative as ever. So the question is; how will you be able to help your colleague, your top manager, your shareholder or your venture capitalist to support your idea and fund the development and execution of it? As you’re proposing an innovation to them, you have to be aware that these decision makers who are assessing your new concept might know very little about the new target market, the new product and business model or the new technology. They would like as much tangible proof as they can get before making a decision. As long as they haven’t decided anything they don’t run any risk. Once they say yes, they will be in it up to their necks.
- “I went to every single record label, and they were like, ‘This guy is terrible. He’s nothing’,’ Jay-Z told MTV in 2001.
- Oprah was pulled off the air.
- Stephen King's first book was rejected by 30 publishers. When Stephen King was writing his first novel Carrie in the 1970s, he was living in a trailer, driving a broken-down Buick and putting in hours as a gas-pump attendant.
- The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein
- Life of Pi, Yann Martel
- Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
- Twilight, Stephanie Meyers - This book reached No. 5 on the New York Time’s Bestseller list after only a month of its publication, and its success did not slow down. But before it became the outrageously successful novel, series, and film franchise, Twilight was rejected by 14 out of the 15 literary agents Meyers contacted.
- Movies
jan 11 2023 ∞
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