we we can! indivi individuals succeed while government fails. that's our show. i'm john stossel. thanks for watching. join us monday. have a good weekend. good night from new york. colonel sanders failed until he was 65 years old. john. john: charlie brown ever learn from his failures. but we can learn from failure. try and try again. that's our show tonight.

♪ >> and now jon stossel. john: i'm a big failure. i started facebook and it failed really? well sorted. when i was in college i published a guidebook for guys that included a fresh picture girls from neighboring all-girls schools. clearly this was the first facebook. unfortunately al gore has suspended the internet so my facebook was an interactive and useful and also to the girls i was about to get publicity. 60s protests erupted stealing all the attention. my facebook had no publicity. years later mark zuckerberg tried again improving on my idea and now he has $40 billion i don't. but i tried again.

i became a tv reporter and that worked out. turns out lots of successful people fail at first. oprah winfrey, steve jobs come the author of dr. seuss. some argue that they were fueled by failure. that's the title of a new book by jeremy bloom. bloom has been a success. you were once an olympic level skier andy played pro-foot all for two nfl teams and yet you say you were fueled by failure? >> my biggest dream in sports was to win an olympic gold medal. my dad is the biggest olympic fan you could ever imagine and when i was 10 years old i was watching the olympics and he would be wiping the tears off his face when a u.s. athlete would win a gold medal. i wanted so badly to give him that feeling. john: and you were favored. >> i was the number one ranked skier in the world. i won more consecutive world cups than anybody in the history of the sport and one inch was

the difference. one engine train of italy was the difference between realize that 23-year-old dream for me. that was my first experience with major failure. john: and then you tried football and said some collegiate records but the ncaa turned you down. >> the ncaa wouldn't allow me to take endorsement money from any olympics here and we use that money to pay for our c-span's is traveling all over the world so without it becomes very difficult. after two years of giving up any endorsement opportunity i was broke. i wanted to go to my second olympics and i have to start accepting an endorsement money. i did and they declared me permanently ineligible. i was able to play in my junior and senior year. john, pro-football. you are only 5 feet 9 inches.

he got drafted by the eagles and an injured and that was gone. signed with the steelers come, injured again, failure again. sam: there was a moment of reflection after the steelers. i had an opportunity to go to my third nfl team in that many years and most of my life you know i've worked at what i was doing and i would weigh the risks and rewards. if the rewards outweighed the risks i would continue on that journey. i think i was able to reach those two levels in athletics but at that point i said it's time to move on. it's time to start new goals and climb any mountain and that's what i did. john: in fueled by failure you say there are vouchers and splatters. jeremy: it was two different types of behavior when you encounter adversity and you can splat and allow that obama to defy new and that way we feel can be insurmountable.

there are bouncers who take a step back from a moment and don't allow whatever thing happened to define who they are and they say i'm going to dissect this moment in my life and extract learnings from it and i'm going to move on. i'm going to move on a 1000 miles an hour in the next direction and that's what i did. i gave myself 48 hours to deal with that olympic and i'm going to dissect everything that happened and after that 48-hour window and moving on a thousand miles an hour to the nfl draft and i was drafted. that helped give me the mental clarity to convince 10 you to pursue the big goals and dreams that i had. otherwise there would be this weight on top of me and i would say all right onto the next thing. so i think it's really important that we don't self-identify too much with those moments of failure that everybody experiences.

john: you've bounced onto some big business success which we'll get to in a moment but first we have social media followers for their favorite examples of people who turned failure into success. on facebook lnp all says michael jordan. basketball team, seventh, eighth and ninth-grader before becoming a superstar. john hayek pointed out to the beatles failed to audition for decca records and happened after that. and marshall posted didn't happen because of their failure. they tried to come up with the superglue since then and that failure has made -- on these things. so you are one of many examples. jeremy: that's why wanted to write the book. my entire athletic career i heard the clichés. i heard the stories but there is no depth to them. there's no outlet to say well why? we hear failure makes you stronger and adversity makes you

have character. i get that but why is that and why did michael jordan continue playing basketball after he was cut in high school? i was raising venture capital for the tech company i have today. i got 100 nose before i got a yes. sublet before we get to that lets look at some of your career achievements. he tried modeling and he did that for a while. it looks good there. then you tried a reality dating show. but those were just experiments because now he has really succeeded by starting a company called the leader in marketing integration whatever that means. >> integrates marketing software transforms the way you -- the integrated platform is to manage the entire lifecycle from a single dashboard. john: jeremy i still don't know what that means that you are making money.

jeremy: departed in consumer terms we have all downloaded something on line and put an inaccurate information the wrong e-mail address because we don't want to be remarketed. it turns out that's a really big problem for big marketing enterprise companies like dell, hp and cisco because the data clogs up their system so we developed software to eliminate those bad and inaccurate leads so their sales team can focus on the leads that matters that we can integrate that on the front door and on the backend of our software we are straight the various disparate marketing systems like crm marketing automation. john: for because you a fast company company. you have failed and succeeded in inspiring ways. thank you jeremy. jeremy: thank you john. john: so many successful people fail at first.

henry ford's first company fail completely. it was called the detroit automobile company and ford took so long to design his car that is financial investors backed out. everyone knows thomas edison invented the light old but you probably don't know that edison filed a thousand patents for ideas that went nowhere. he was also fired by the telegraph office. he lost money invested in the cement company in an iron business. then came the lightbulb. another invention that grew out of failure, not on par with the lightbulb but still very successful is this toy. >> introducing laser pen. laser pens and that only that only construction system that lets you create with light. light up your creations as you build. john: laser pegs were invented by john. you can call it success by failure. >> ferguson when i grew up there ferguson missouri,.

john: you dropped out of your school when you were a sophomore. >> it was a rough school with a lot of fights. john: you might have gone on welfare. >> i might have. >> i might have been said that i started by reading a lot of self-help books and finding out who i was and i had a knack for inventing better reflected that act over and over again. i invented a lot of things that weren't subtle. john: you invented a headache relief and what sounds like quackery so glad i wasn't successful. cell phone. cell phone ads that block callers. >> too many cell phones applications across to many platforms of that failed as well. john: a battery-operated shoelace, shoelaces. >> the reason they failed is the chinese knocked us off to. john: they sold well but you got ripped off by imitations. >> you can find the magnitude of them and you them and you see them and retail chains as well.

john: you started submitting ideas to companies. >> i did; but a lot of no letters and i'd pin them on my board but after time i threw them away because it doesn't matter. john: were you demoralize? >> demoralize? >> the demoralization happens every day as an inventor. 67 years old and his entire plant turns down in 1914 and he just starts over the next day. the mindset really. i think if you want to do something in life you have to have a mindset in you constantly have to feed your mind just like exercise in the gym. you have to exercise your mind with little sound bytes. john: any come up with these laser pegs. they look just like legos with light so what's the deal? >> hp's touches the current which has never been done before. you have a stack pattern, stack up top and then you have to spend patterns so it's three times that of legos. to complement legos brand and we are not out to compete with legos bread.

john: now the company is worth $40 million. >> is growing at the rate of 35 to 40% a year so growing out of business. john: does what the last guest said resonate about bouncing or splattering? >> it's all relative. the mindset of how you look at it continuously day in and day out. john: congratulations on overcoming plenty of failure. jon: appreciated. john: coming up dejanelle the colonel sanders was a failure in and the author that created the harry potter books. >> i was the biggest failure i knew. had i really succeeded with anything else i might never have found that determination to succeed in the one arena where i believed i truly b

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john: last segment one of my guests made a statement that resonated with me. he said when it comes to failure it depends on a deal with because their bouncers and splatters and i think i'm a splatter. when i fail i don't bounce right back. i get to moralize but researching the show i see how

stupid that attitude is because so many people fail repeatedly before they succeed. isaac newton failed that farming he changed the world by defining gravity and inventing a new world of math. entrepreneur keele obsessed with getting a job at a fancy law law firm that failed at that and we should be glad because he tried something else. he created the start of paypal. >> make it possible to send money to each other by internet. john magid allowed him to find other companies that change people's lives. people who fail the first but succeeded often say in retrospect i only succeeded because i failed first. this woman says that. >> iowa state lone parent and it's impossible to be in britain without being homeless. john: that is j.k. rowling. she went on to write some children's books featuring a boy

named harry potter and those books sold more copies than any fiction ever. her experience led her to give speeches on the benefits of failing. in her case she says thanks to failure. >> i stopped presenting to myself that i was anything other than what i was and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that matter to me. had i really succeeded at anything else i might never have found that determination to succeed in the one arena where pulito truly belongs. i was set free. john: now she has a million dollars and her kids are better off because her failure gave her the motivation and time to write. likewise, i'm better off because i have one of these things, and i found and also in apple computer. steve jobs started the company but then had failures. apple's board of directors force jobs that even though he was the founder. >> it's devastating.

i really didn't know what to do for a few months. 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 happiness of inc. successful was replaced by the likeness of being a beginner again. john: he learned from his failures and started a company called next and then pixar. >> when people underground. >> i'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if i hadn't been fired from apple. john: a few years after pixar apple was failing so they rehired jobs in the helped make apple the biggest company in the world and gave me this. sometimes people fail nearly their whole lives and they become successful. colonel sanders founder of the kentucky fried chicken chain first failed running a motel and then a gas station and then a restaurant. finally when he was in his 60s he started kfc.

>> don't quit at age 65. maybe your boat hasn't come in yet. john: now there are 18,000 kfc restaurants. one advantage to trying and failing and trying again is that failing becomes less incapacitating over time. repetition helps you become a bouncer rather than a splatter. actor and pro-football terry crews says that's what happened to him when he played football. >> i got cut almost every year. i learned failure. it was my buddy. every failure i got a little bit higher that no is negotiable. when people tell you know or project you did maybe for now but tomorrow it may be yes so i learned to keep going. john: that something lots of successful people have learned. harrison ford spent years working as a carpenter before making it as an actor. albert einstein and charles darwin both had trouble in school. darwin wrote i was considered by all my teachers and my father below the common.

failure is painful but pushing through it has its rewards. >> it is impossible to live without failing at something msu lives so cautiously that he might as well not have lived at all. john: coming up why letting your child fail and fall is a good thing. in new york state, we believe tomorrow starts today. all across the state the economy is growing, with creative new business incentives, the lowest taxes in decades, and university partnerships, attracting the talent and companies of tomorrow. like in utica, where a new kind of workforce is being trained.

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gene when i asked you on facebook what are good examples of failure that turned into success, babies learning to walk. they all fall down again and again but keep on trying until they succeed. yes it's a great example. babies learning to walk, just in the humans. if people are left to their own devices as this commercial suggests.

>> full of set backs and bumps. john: babies fall trying to bakken and they try again. here's a similar commercial from india. they are selling baby oil but they also show the thrill that baby and mom when a child is left on his own long enough to triumph by taking his first steps. today kids managed to learn to walk but many parents want to protect their kids from falling. such protection is a bad thing says the author of playing to win and that sociologists hillary levy friedman. to bad thing because? >> unless you learn to fail you can never actually learn what it feels like to win. you might have success sometimes

but until you really fall down and go splat and learn to pick yourself back up again you are not learning all the skills that will serve you well throughout your entire life. if you can believe it they sell kneepads for kids now as they learn to crawl. what kind of kneepads or how much are we going to put on kids by the time they get to college? john: there's a self-esteem movement this is everybody's a winner, nobody's of failure. sports events. everybody gets a eight -- a 3 billion-dollar business page page -- business push to them. hilary: and that the reason we have so many of those trophies is the self-esteem movement that started in california in the 70s and 80s have pushed a lot of athletics in particular outside of the school system. that's why we have all these place to pay activities now. it's not just part of school and the everyday experience but you

have to pay-to-play which automatically make for a lot of these competitive activities limited to upper middle class and middle-class middle class kids of them a question well if it is important to win and to lose -- today. john: is an important one unless? they say when my kid was and is soccer league we didn't keep score. hilary: you said exactly what's right. kids are very savvy. when i talk to kids for the book they knew exactly what was going on. john: you write that failure prepares kids quick. hilary: began in many cases. it's not just about school success are getting into a good college or getting into a good graduate school. it's about getting a job or getting another job and not only that it's also about romance. you can watch one of these reality shows who turns out the winner. there's really only one and at the end of the day ideally there's only going to be one person that you make with for life. john: so people can fail and asked people to do better? hilary: you have to build the

present is to get back into the dating game. we think so much is about preparing kids for school but these skills are transferable to many different activities. john: to protect my child at all costs movement has gotten so crazy in some wealthy parts of the hollywood that even bill maher has noticed. >> would it be get this idea that children should never endure the slightest risk or experience any disappointment? these kids are more anxious than a squirrel on crystal meth. john: not learning how to fail constantly makes you anxious. hilary: a can. we are seeing waves of college students now who are not prepared not only to deal with the failure in the classroom or romantic failure but the failure of not knowing how to do their own laundry. when parents coddle their kids. john: you were at brown university and you see this affect the parents? hilary: we are seeing students who aren't always prepared to get perhaps a.

>> on a paper. it's income principle to them. john: did a quick? hilary: they might drop a class defined in easier grade. we see this student take first semester organic chemistry and doesn't do well and decides my dream of dana doctor is out the window. john: one of the results of the self-esteem movement is americans think they are smart on surveys. they asked do you do well in math and american kids compared to other countries rank themselves number one and self-esteem in math but less roll the chart of how well they actually do. they are ranked country by country and they are not number one on the chart. where's the united states? we still haven't gotten to the united states. they ranked 34 countries and finally there we are at 27. kind of near the bottom so we think we are smarter than we are