Every success book, seminar or life coach out there can tell you that failure is just a stepping stone towards success. And they’re right. It is. But that simple piece of information won’t help you. Information is power only when applied in real-life situations. In this case, that means being able to view failure for what it really is: feedback.

You then simply extract different lessons from that feedback and you’re on your way to success. That sounds easier than it really is. Everybody gets caught up in the day-to-day drama of work, family or friends. It’s easy to forget the basic rules and feel like a failure after something doesn’t work out, especially in business.

Recommended Reading: 7 Successful Entrepreneurs Who Began As Freelancers

Failure Beats You Up

It’s the habitual first ‘instinct’ to feel disappointed in yourself when the start-up you’ve invested so much in fails. After such a defeat, you couldn’t care less about the mantra failure equals feedback that those ‘success gurus’ keep chanting. It’s understandable. But let me show you some real-life examples that will actually prove that that very mantra is true.

Here are 5 giant entrepreneurial figures (whose net worth in total comes in at around $90 billion or so) who didn’t succumb in the face of early failure, but rather enjoyed and appreciated it for the lessons heeded. And they aren’t afraid to admit it.

FunBug – Nick Woodman

Net Worth $1,750,000,000

Nick was a ‘B student’ during college and an avid surfer, a hobby which often times interfered with his studies. He wasn’t born a billionaire. Before creating the now wildly successful brand of wearable cameras – GoPro, he failed in great style with two online startups during the crazed dotcom bubble of 2000.

The Failures

First, he created EmpowerAll.com, an e-commerce site aimed at a young demographic which sold very cheap electronics. The company didn’t make any profit, so it was quickly shut down. That didn’t drive our future billionaire out of the business arena; it drove him to try harder, so in 1999 he set up FunBug, an online marketing company.

The site gave users the chance to win cash prizes in return for participating in sweepstakes. It was marketing through games. He even managed to raise $3.9 million in funding from different investors. The company was on the rise, but by 2001, Nick had to admit failure once again. He wasn’t able to create a sustainable user base from which to drive profit via the companies he was marketing.

Here’s what he said to Forbes about failing the second time and losing almost $4 million dollars:

"I mean nobody likes to fail, but the worst thing was I lost my investors’ money and these were people that believed in this young guy that was passionate about this idea… you start to question: are my ideas really good?"

The Lesson

After losing the second company, Nick cleared his head by going on a surf trip, a long one. Once back, he started working on a prototype for a camera which can be used by athletes: GoPro.

‘I was so afraid that GoPro was going to go away like Funbug that I would work my ass off. That’s what the first boom and bust did for me. I was so scared that I would fail again that I was totally committed to succeed.’

Only this time, there was no bust, only the boom. GoPro made him one of the youngest billionaires in the world, and the owner of the fastest-growing camera company in America.

Traf-O-Data – Bill Gates

Net Worth $72,700,000,000

Before being the richest person in the world and owning Xanadu 2.0 (the ‘Bill Gates House’), a computerized residence with real-time adjustable temperature, music and lightining for each pin-wearing guest, Bill Gates was a failing entrepreneur.

The Failure

His first company was Traf-O-Data, the objective of which was ‘to read the raw data from roadway traffic counters and create reports for traffic engineers‘. In this way, the company would optimize traffic and end road congestion.

The company’s product was the Traf-O-Data 8008, a device which could read traffic tapes and process the data. They first tried to sell the processing service to the local County, but their first demo failed because the machine ‘didn’t work’, recalled Gates.

The Lesson

His partner, Paull Allen, summarised the experience for exactly what it was: ‘Even though Traf-O-Data wasn’t a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft’s first product a couple of years later’

And happily, that’s exactly what they did. They kept on going and Microsoft became the largest personal-computer software company in the world. But it’s still nice to know that even the richest philanthropist in the world can make business blunders.

Dyson – James Dyson

Net Worth $3,000,000,000

Most people think inventors are born inventors, with some special talent or gift. Their genetic makeup must be different than that of us mere mortals. But in fact, the opposite is true. Inventors are created; they’re ‘grinders’.

Sir James Dyson’s company is now a worldwide success, selling bag-less vacuum cleaners in over 50 countries. It made him a billionaire. But he had to fail a lot of times before he can get to that winning formula.

The Failure

In fact, he created 5127 vacuum prototypes, all of which could be considered ‘failed attempts’. He spent 15 years perfecting his product before taking the DCO1 to market in ’93. The vacuum works on his own patented principle of cyclonic separation, that’s why it doesn’t need a bag. This innovation took a lot of dedication:

‘There are countless times an inventor can give up on an idea. By the time I made my 15th prototype, my third child was born. By 2,627, my wife and I were really counting our pennies. By 3,727, my wife was giving art lessons for some extra cash. These were tough times, but each failure brought me closer to solving the problem.’

With such relentless drive despite failures and hardships, how could Dyson not be a billionaire? I dare say, no matter what other business he would have started, he’d be successful. That’s what dedication gets you.

The Lesson

True inventors are the biggest failing lot you could encounter. And that’s a compliment. Failing is the only way through which you can create something new. But real inventors, they don’t even call it ‘failing’. As Thomas Edison famously put it:‘I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.’ Sir James Dyson, the founder of the Dyson Company really took this principle to heart.

So if you want to create anything, the way you view your failed attempts will decide whether or not you’re going to succeed.

Apple – Steve Jobs

Net Worth $10,200,000,000

We all know Steve Jobs as the Guru entrepreneur, the genius behind best-selling products such as the iPod, iPad, the iPhone or the MacBook. He is the most influential business figure of our time and he’s going to be forever reminded as the Da Vinci of our tech-world renaissance.

The Failure

What we know less of is Steve are his nothing-burger creations. Believe it or not, Apple was producing exactly that at one time. Remember the Lisa? Of course not. Steve managed to waste millions of dollars in development to create such mass amnesia. It would have been cheaper to simply hypnotize every customer out there.

He had a track-record for this sort of thing, considering that in the previous Apple dud episode, he and partner Steve Wozniak invested their savings and time into the Apple I, which sold a not-so-impressive 175 units. But it was the Lisa development fiasco which got Steve Jobs kicked out of the company he founded.

Applying the principle ‘failure is just feedback’, Jobs went on to create another company: NeXT. That company also met its demise, due to hardware issues in the product. Eventually the software division was sold to Apple, and Steve returned to his starting point.

The Lesson

But now, armed with so many failures, Jobs was more determined than ever to succeed. His dream of creating ‘a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now‘ just like ‘Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel‘ was finally going to manifest.

Ask yourself this: What if Steve had stopped? How would the world be different now?

Read Also: Where These Internet Pioneers Got Their Names

Virgin’s Richard Branson

Net Worth $4,600,000,000

Richard Branson really cashed in on the ‘failure principle’. He made it work to the point where he’s one of the most well-known entrepreneurs in the world. The Virgin Brand is one of the most recognizable brands out there, carrying a lot of weight, especially thanks to Richard’s charming persona and televised adventures.

The Failures

But if you were to meet him in his teens, you wouldn’t really bet on his later success. Branson had poor reading and math skills, dropped out of high-school and is proud to admit he’s dyslexic all his life. Not really your first choice for a billionaire philanthropist knight and worldwide media icon.

But this guy, with his perfect 59-year old blonde hair and dazzling mumbling charm didn’t always have a hold over an empire of 400 companies. His first business endeavor, the Student Magazine which he started when he was 16, had difficulties with, believe it or not, the UK’s law enforcement agencies. Richard almost went to jail for publishing remedies for veneral disease in the magazine.

It didn’t stop there. His Virgin record shops, in the midst of cash-flow problems, almost put him in jail again. This time it was for something more serious: tax evasion. After spending one night in prison, the plea bargain for £60,000 was paid.

The experience, as he recalls, had a big impact on him: ‘I vowed to myself that I would never again do anything that would cause me to be imprisoned or, indeed, do any kind of business deal that would embarrass me.’

The trend of failures however kept on going for him for pretty much his entire life: Virgin Cola (for which he drove a tank in Times Square), Virgin Vodka, Virgin Vie, Virgin Brides (for which he dressed up as a bride), Virgin Clothing, Virgin Cars, Virgin Digital all failed. And the list could go on for a long time.

The Lesson

I guess you could say Branson is the king of the entrepreneurship club, according to his definition: ‘Learn from failure. If you are an entrepreneur and your first venture wasn’t a success, welcome to the club!’

So, Failure is Feedback!

Conclusion

The fact of the matter is most of the people you see in Forbes’ list of richest people in the world had to take enormous risks to get there. That almost always means a lot of failing. I know it’s easy to put on tag on the rich and say: They had it easy. It’s their parents. They were lucky. It’s probably secret societies or reincarnation. Or maybe alien control.

You can find a dozen reasons to internalize somebody else’s success as ‘luck’ or ‘special access to information’. The reality is 73 out of the first 100 billionaires in the world are self-made. That’s a Bloomberg fact. There’s no conspiracy going on. They just work harder than you did.

Those self-made billionaires simply applied some core, fundamental knowledge everybody else has access to. They did what everyone only read about. But knowing and doing are very different things. Failure and success are very similar in that they’re both spiral staircases. Once you get on, inertia keeps you going, and adds some dizziness to the process. Stop failure’s spiral by seeing it as feedback or you’re going to go deeper and eventually crash and burn.

So what are you going to do next time you fail? Give up? Or become the next billionaire?

August is here so it’s time for another round up!

In this round, we have some great tools from a Photoshop action that creates 3-dimensional maps, an awesome Google Chrome extension for testing out responsive design, and a tool to create Long Shadow designs. Here they are, in no particular order.

Source Tree

SourceTree is a client app for Github and Mercurial version control system. It allows you to manage your repositories in a very simple and intuitive User Interface. It is the perfect app for people who are not comfortable of doing Version Control through Command line.

tmTheme Editor

tmTheme is a theme file for syntax highlighting for code editors like Sublime Text and TextMate. There are several .tmTheme available to download for free, and ready for use if you want to change your code highlighting colors. But, if you want it to be more personalized, you can use tmTheme Editor from Herokuapp, which makes creating and editing much easier.

Colour Code

There are a lot of tools for generating color schemes on the Web. Here’s one more. Colour Code is a very intuitive and easy to use web-application for generating color scheme. Simply move the mouse cursor and it will instantly generate the colors on the specified rule — Monochrome, Analogic, Complement, Triad, etc. We can also download the color scheme in LESS format and PNG.

Long Shadow Generator

In our previous article, we have shown you some examples of Long Shadow design applications. Now if you want to apply the same effect, this PSD file will allow you to apply this shadow effect in your design element much quicker.

Dimension

Dimension is a really nice Google Chrome extension for testing your responsive design without having to resize the browser window. It comes with ruler showing the viewport size, a draggable handle to resize the viewport size, and Preview Mode to simulate the design in various device type.

Mapita

Mapita a Photoshop action that lets you turn your flat layers into 3-dimensional map. It comes with several common map elements like Grass, Snow, Buildings, Trees, and Clouds. This Photoshop Action is created by Wassim at BlueGraphic, and it is free!

Buttons

Creating Web buttons is technically easy, but it would be better if we can build one real quick. Buttons is a collection of class helpers that allows us to do so. It provides a set of CSS to build various button styles. It is built using Sass and Compass, so the styles are completely configurable to meet your requirements.

Fontastic

There are a lot of font icons available for free, but they usually come with a bunch of icons that we do not need. By using Fontastic you can include only the icons you need, eventually helping to speed up your website. At the time of the writing, it has more than 1700 of icons.

Dev Tools Secret

All modern browsers come with its own Dev Tool that helps developers develop and debug the website. But there are so many more buried features that we do not know of. The Dev Tools Secret, as the name implies, lists the hidden features of the browser’s Dev Tool.

Popular UI

I bet that you have visited either one of these popular websites; Facebook, Rdio, Github, and Apple. The Popular UI is a collection of these websites’ user interface, which is rebuilt by Luke Chesser in Photoshop for educational purpose. You can learn how the layers are structured and organized, and also see how the effects are built. It’s a very useful resource for beginners especially.

Emailing is another medium of communication which is being widely used. For people who are working in social networking or the Web, you might get a lot of emails from different organizations. Springcleaning the address book is a mindless but important task we have to take to keep our contacts accessible.

Usually in emails, there will be a signature block which contain details such as sender’s name, phone number, social website URLs and more. Changes to these info are usually unannounced, but if you don’t notice them, then you might lose out.

WriteThat.Name is a tool to help prevent that. It helps users to automatically update their address book by scanning signature block in emails. The app only works with Gmail accounts, Google App emails and Outlook.

Recommended Reading: Essential Guide To Managing Google Contacts

Update Contacts Details Automatically

To start updating contact details automatically, browse over to WriteThat.Name and connect your Gmail account to it. When an email reaches a Gmail or MS Outlook Inbox, WriteThat.Name will scan the email for the sender’s signature block.

A sender’s signature block or email signature is usually filled with details such as their name, phone number, email address and the company they are working for. WriteThat.Name will sync all of that info with your address book, keeping your contacts list updated.

If the signature block that WriteThat.Name scanned is new, it will add it as a new contact. Contacts that are recognized, will be updated accordingly.

Users can set to let WriteThat.Name automatically update the contacts or to update them only after receiving confirmation by the user.

WriteThat.Name allow users to add multiple email accounts but note that changes will only be made to the master address book. If you have two separate email accounts with two sets of contacts you want to keep separate, connect them to WriteThat.Name independently.

An added feature is the email confirmation feature. Users can send the contacts an email to get confirmation if the latest contact details detected by WriteThat.Name are accurate or if it is their most current details.

More

Flashback

For new users who want WriteThat.Name to scan emails from previous years, they can do so with Flashback. However, Flashback is a paid service which cost $35.00 per past year of email scans, and $100.00 for the past 5 years’ worth of email scans.

To distinguish new contacts in your address book after a scan, there will be a ‘via Writethat.name’ label on the contacts. There will be a full report available after WriteThat.Name does a complete scan.

Pricing

New users will get to try the ‘Premium’ plan for a month. After a month, users will need to choose if they want to continue using other paid plan or a free plan.

There are three plans:

• Max Power – Create unlimited new contacts/month, unlimited multi-account update. [$59/year]
• Premium – Create max: 300 contacts/month, up to 3 multi-account update. [$35/year]
• Free – Create maximum of 10 contacts/month, no multi-account update. [Free]

WriteThat.Name for MS Outlook which is only free for 30 days requires an annual subscription of $48 to continue. If user decides not to subscribe, WriteThat.Name will stop updating contacts on their MS Outlook address book.

Conclusion

WriteThat.Name is a helpful tool to keep address books automatically and constantly up-to-date especially for power users. It can keep track of the same contact if he or she has changed numbers, work place or social accounts. This helps users to stay in the loop and keep up with their network circles efficiently.

Family moments are worth sharing, preserving and writing about. Sharing pictures, videos and moments with family usually means, for the average person, sitting down and sharing the memories through a digital camera or mobile phone, but there is a much easier way. Let me introduce to you Origami.

Not to be confused with photo and media storage services like Picturelife or Dropbox, Origami brings to you a new approach to sharing memories through media with your family members.

Recommended Reading: 15 Great Free Online File Sharing Alternatives

Getting Started with Origami

To get started with Origami is an easy and simple process, in fact, it is one of the easiest and fastest registration processes I have seen in a long time. Signing up register you a free trial account.

Once your account is all set up and ready to go you can now easily invite all your family members to all your favorite moments and memories. After that, everyone can post media, which will be neatly organized into a stylish family timeline.

Adding Photos and Other Media

You can connect your Origami account with your other cloud storage storage and photo-sharing services like Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, Smugmug, Drive and Dropbox. This obviously makes it a breeze to add photos, videos, slideshows and whole albums.

Other Noteworthy Features

Request Content and Moments

Ever wondered what Uncle Sal was like growing up, and what great moments he had? You can even request content and moments from family members that are registered with your family in Origami. It will be like a virtual family gathering where everyone can join in on an occasion from a past or recent event.

Sharing Media

The team behind Origami makes it easy to upload and share media with a "sticky” sidebar that stays with you while navigating around the app. Simply choose the appropriate type of media you would like to upload and follow the steps.

Sharing with outside family and friends

You might come across a time when you want to share your memories and moments with people outside of your family circle in Origami. The app makes it simple to share like this, simply click "Share Album” or "Share Moments” under the content titles to email the link or contact them via Facebook and Twitter.

Pricing

Origami has an amazing price and only one account type, $5/Month or $50/Year (which saves you $10). When you upgrade, you get:

• A custom domain name for your family. (For example, Langlois.com or LangloisFamily.net)
• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited phone and email support

Advantages

• Mobile support for iOS and Android devices
• Stylish and organized timeline of events, moments, pictures, videos etc
• Invite family members with multiple accounts and social networks
• Share pictures and memories with people not using Origami (Like friends, co-workers and non-relatives)
• Custom domain names, unlimited space and great support with a cheap $5/Month plan
• Invite as many family members as you wish
• Request media and moments from other family members
• Great notifications including to your mobile phone, email and Facebook
• Rich, stylish and simple to use design

Disadvantages

• No feature for searching existing family members
• No account links to Skydrive or Box.net
• No individual family profiles
• No account signup with Facebook or Twitter support