“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
— Henry Ford
Henry Ford said this reflecting on his early business failures. His first two car companies collapsed before he founded Ford Motor Company in 1903. The quote appeared in his 1922 autobiography My Life and Work.
My first company, the Detroit Automobile Company, went under in 1901. I had spent two years and all my backers' money and produced cars that were too expensive and too slow. Everyone said I was finished. I went back to my workshop and started over. Built a racing car, won a race, got new investors. My second company fell apart too when I fought with my backers over what kind of car to build. I was forty years old with two failed companies behind me. Then I started Ford Motor Company. The Model T came five years later. I did not get smarter between failures. I just stopped making the same mistakes.