Getting kicked to the curb by your employer can certainly be demoralizing.
But these successful people prove that what may initially feel like failure may just be the launching pad you need for success.
From Steve Jobs to Jerry Seinfeld, here are 21 people who turned their termination into an opportunity.
Vivian Giang and Alana Horowitz contributed to earlier versions of this article.
SEE ALSO: What 21 highly successful people were doing at age 25
Thomas Edison secretly conducted experiments in his office at Western Union that got him fired.
Until one night in 1867, when he had a chemical accident at the Associated Press bureau news wire, according to “Famous Americans: A Directory of Museums, Historic Sites, and Memorials.”
Edison worked the night shift so he could have more time to spend on his inventions and reading. One night when he was experimenting with batteries, Edison spilled some sulfuric acid that ate through the floor and spilled onto his boss’ desk below.
He was fired the next morning, but decided to pursue inventing full-time and received his first patent two years later for the electric vote recorder, according to Bio.
Before heading to Yale, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was fired from her brief stint at a salmon cannery in Valdez, Alaska.
The former New York Senator recounted on the “Today” show on Monday that after graduating from Wellesley College, she and some friends worked their way across Alaska washing dishes, and she eventually wound up working in a fishery scooping out salmon guts.
“I was given a spoon and some boots and I was told to take out the insides of the salmon,” she said.
Clinton didn’t last long in that role, however, noting that the Japanese workers who were taking out the caviar yelled at her for working too slowly. “So they literally kicked me out of that job,” Clinton said.
She says they then placed her on the line packing the salmon head to tail. But when she noticed the salmon were “green and black — they looked horrible” and a peculiar stench, she questioned the man running the operation about the salmon’s quality.
“When I left, I came back the next day and the whole operation was gone,” Clinton said. “So I think that was the equivalent of getting fired.”
During a previous inter viw on Letterman in 2007, Clinton called her stint at the cannery her “favorite summer job of all time,” noting its role in her future success: “Best preparation for being in Washington that you can imagine,” she said.
Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, the company he cofounded. His second act turned out to be bigger and better than the first.
When Jobs was in his 30s, the very company he created fired him.
“I was out — and very publicly out,” Jobs said in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University. “What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.”
Jobs spent the summer of 1985 in a “midlife crisis” trying to decide what he wanted to do, from entering politics to becoming an astronaut, said Alan Deutschman, author of “The Second Coming of Steve Jobs.”
During his time away from Apple, Jobs cofounded computer company NeXT, which was later acquired by Apple, and launched Pixar Animation Studios. When he returned to Apple nearly a decade later, he brought the innovation of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
