PEOPLE WHO FAILED BEFORE BECOMING RICH AND FAMOUS.

The names Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan and Steve Jobs aren't usually associated with failure. 

But before these successful super stars made it big in their respective industries, they first failed, were fired, or heard the word "no" countless times.
 
But they never gave up.
See what these game changers had to overcome before becoming famous.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey was told she was "unfit for TV."

At age of 22, the now-TV mogul was fired from her job as a television reporter because she was "unfit for TV."

Winfrey was terminated from her post as co-anchor of the 6 o'clock weekday news on Baltimore's WJZ-TV after the show received low ratings. Winfrey has called it the “first and worst failure of her TV career.”

Winfrey was then demoted to morning TV, where she found her voice and met fellow newbie Gayle King, who would one day become her producer and editor of O, The Oprah Magazine.

Seven years later, Winfrey moved to Chicago, where her self-titled talk show went on to dominate daytime TV for 25 years, and ultimately head her own channel, OWN.

Steve Jobs  

Steve Jobs was removed from the company he started.

Steve Jobs was a college dropout, a fired tech executive and an unsuccessful businessman.

At 30-years-old he was left devastated after being unceremoniously removed from the company he founded.

In a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, Jobs explained, "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."
After his return to Apple, Jobs created several iconic products, including the iPod, iPhone and iPad, which have changed the face of consumer technology forever. And Jobs became one of the richest men in the world.

Michael Jordan 

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.

After being cut from his high school basketball team, a young Michael Jordan went home and cried in the privacy of his bedroom.

But Jordan didn't let this early-in-life setback stop him from playing the game and the basketball superstar has stated, "I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

The Beatles 

The Beatles were dropped by their record label.

When The Beatles were just starting out, a recording company told them no.
Decca Recording studios, who had recorded 15 songs with the group, said "we don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out. They have no future in show business."

Walt Disney

Walt Disney was told a mouse would never work.

Before Walt Disney built the empire he has today, he was fired by a newspaper editor because "he lacked imagination and had no good ideas."
 
In 1921, Walt formed his first animation company in Kansas City, where he made a deal with a distribution company in New York, in which he would ship them his cartoons and get paid six months down the road. He was forced to dissolve his company and at one point could not pay his rent and reportedly survived by eating dog food.

Also, When Walt first tried to get MGM studios to distribute Mickey Mouse in 1927, he was told that the idea would never work because a giant mouse on the screen would terrify women.

Entrepreneur Walt had a whole slew of bad ideas before coming up with good ones, read about them here.

J.K.Rowling 

J.K.Rowling was on welfare

Before J.K. Rowling had any "Harry Potter" success, the writer was a divorced singled mother on welfare struggling to get by while also attending school and writing a novel.

Luckily, that novel turned into the "Harry Potter" franchise, which has since made Rowling a billionaire as of April 2012.

Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison was dropped out of school.

Thomas Edison is probably the most famous and productive inventor of all time, with more than 1,000 patents in his name, including the electric light bulb, phonograph, and motion picture camera. He became a self-made multimillionaire and won a Congressional Gold Medal.

 Edison got a late start in his schooling following an illness, and, as a result, his mind often wandered, prompting one of his teachers to call him "addled." He dropped out after only three months of formal education. Luckily, his mother had been a schoolteacher in Canada and home-schooled young Edison.

Albert Einstein

Although we use the name Einstein to dub someone a genius, the future scientist’s teachers believed that Einstein was mentally challenged. In fact, he was unable to speak fluently until age 12 and was expelled from high school at age 16 for failing several subjects. 

It wasn’t until he reached 18 that he pursued his interest in calculus and physics and used his unconventional mind to formulate the ground-breaking theory of relativity and change the face of modern physics.

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin wore many hats: politician, diplomat, author, printer, publisher, scientist, inventor, founding father, and coauthor and cosigner of the Declaration of Independence. One thing he was not was a high school graduate. 

Franklin was the fifteenth child and youngest son in a family of 20. He spent two years at the Boston Latin School before dropping out at age ten and going to work for his father, and then his brother, as a printer.

Bill Gates

Bill Gates is a co-founder of the software giant Microsoft and has been ranked the richest person in the world for a number of years. Gates dropped out of Harvard in his junior year after reading an article about the Altair microcomputer in Popular Electronics magazine. He and his friend Paul Allen formed Micro Soft (later changed to Microsoft) to write software for the Altair.