A Delicious Story Of Rejection

entrepreneurs. He was born in: 1890

First, let’s clarify a few biographical details. The title of “colonel” is a real honorific, but one peculiar to the Commonwealth of Kentucky. It is not a military rank but something awarded to civilians who have achieved noteworthy accomplishments or else contributed to society in a remarkable or outstanding way. So, interestingly, there are many “Kentucky colonels,” and each of them is recognized for their role as a kind of goodwill ambassador for the state of Kentucky, sharing its culture and traditions. That said, the title has gone to people from all walks of life, from celebrities, artists, businesspeople, politicians, and even royalty who have no particular connection to Kentucky.

Sanders didn’t hit on his big idea from the start. Instead, he worked all kinds of jobs and was, at various points, an insurance salesman, farmer, lawyer, gas station operator, and steam engine stoker. He sold his first chicken at a diner in North Corbin, Kentucky during the Great Depression. The “secret recipe” combined with his technique of cooking chicken in a pressure fryer created the classic fried chicken now familiar to so many.

his brand and scaling up. In: 1952

Sanders died of leukemia at the age of 90. At that point, there were approximately 6,000 KFC branches in 48 countries all over the world, bringing in a combined $6.3 billion sales annually every year. Today, the number of restaurants is a whopping 25,000 in 145 countries – which is more countries than McDonald’s!

So much for the official KFC story, but what about Sanders as a person? Who was he, and can we learn anything from him when it comes to resilience?

It was in: 1950

Once this public image took root, Sanders never abandoned it for the rest of his days. For the final decades of his life as KFC brand ambassador, it was all he wore. His hair went white, and he bleached his mustache to match.

John Y. Brown Jr. claimed that he was "a brilliant man with a gourmet flair for food, a visionary and a great motivator, with the style of a showman and the discipline of a Vince Lombardi (a famous football coach).”

So, we know that he was slightly eccentric, and that people around him tended to admire his perseverance, dedication, and ambition. You don’t build a massive restaurant empire from scratch without a few skills, no doubt! But what was the colonel’s “secret recipe,” so to speak?

Well, let’s look at the timeline: Sanders was already in his sixties when he ran his initial restaurant. After it closed, he was flat broke. He actually retired and took his first social security check for the princely sum of $105. For many others, this would have been the end of the line. Old and getting older, there are not many pensioners who would choose this moment start a massive business venture, especially not one based on something as simple as fried chicken. He'd already had many failed jobs by then and three kids from a failed marriage under his belt.

But Sanders loved fried chicken. And he was really, really convinced that the world needed to taste his version. At first, he went around from restaurant to restaurant and tried a sales tactic that might have made most salesmen balk in horror. He offered to cook up a batch of his chicken there and then for the owners. If they agreed it was good, he’d arrange to have them sell his chicken at their restaurant.

rs was ultimately turned down: 1009

If we’re frank, most of us today have a vision of success that skews, shall we say, to the youthful. We love poring over “billionaire by 30” lists, get a thrill out of imagining that Mozart had composed his first symphony at 9 years old, and that Alexander the Great had built the largest empire in the known world before his thirtieth birthday (more on him later)!

If you happen to be in your thirties, forties, or older, there’s absolutely no reason to think that your chance for success has passed you by. In fact, there are plenty of examples of brilliant people who only got started later in life. Julia Child published her first mega-seller cookbook at age 50, Toni Morrison won a Nobel Prize for literature when she was 62, and actor Steve Carrell didn’t make an acting name for himself until he was 42.

Basically, if you’re still alive, there’s time!

Think about it: is there really any reason why, at some magically pre-determined age, you should suddenly be unable to act towards your dreams? What exactly happens at 30, 40 or 50 that means success is no longer on the cards for you? Sanders took just 12 years to build up a business he eventually sold for millions. He started late, but he believed in what he wanted to do, and that belief carried him through.

If we dig deeper into this, we may guess at other traits that helped the Colonel become the Colonel. When he found his stereotypical, white-suited image, he stuck with it. He lived the KFC brand day in and day out. But he wasn’t always the Colonel – he had spent years in an assortment of roles and, by his own admission, failed at all of them.

We can imagine now that his perfect role as the colonel was somehow inevitable and just waiting for him in the future, but Sanders had to do something important to get there: he had to refuse to let the past define him. Too often, we let adversity, failure, and challenge in the past determine how much we are allowed to succeed in the future. Sanders could have defined himself as a failed lawyer, a down-and-out divorcee, or a retired gas station boy. He didn’t.

This is an important point. When Sanders was visiting restaurants trying to convince people of the greatness of his special recipe, he didn’t allow the hundreds of rejections to let him stop expecting a yes. No matter how many times you’ve failed, you can still succeed on your very next time. And once you do, all those failures won’t matter.

Success is never guaranteed, but there is one guaranteed way to fail – give up!

You are only a failure if you give up and tell yourself that it’s over. Persistence is not some superhuman feat, though. It’s more like stubbornness! You don’t always need to see the light at the end of tunnel. You don’t have to pretend it isn’t hard or scary. You don’t even have to be sure that something will come through in the end. All you have to do is keep going. That’s it.

Resilience is the kind of strength that often takes time to build. Rather than imagining that each passing day is somehow a failure, see it as one more steppingstone, one more opportunity to build on who you are, learn something, and cultivate the right mindset.

There are many advantages to starting late. For one, you are older and wiser (yes, wiser, even if you don’t really feel like it!). You have experience. Younger people may have energy and enthusiasm, but how often does this fizzle out or take them in the wrong direction? We tend to think of passion as belonging to the young, but there is a kind of dogged determinism that belongs only to those who are old enough to understand what’s really at stake. The fact that your time may be limited may be precisely the thing that allows you to weather current adversities and get serious about what you really want to do with your life. And, paradoxically, it’s what allows you to take risks. What have you got to lose, really?

If you are currently facing adversity and feeling like a failure, take heart: you probably have only encountered a small fraction of the failure that Colonel Sanders endured. Think about that: if he had quit at the point that most people tend to quit, even he would not have found the success he did.

Finishing what you start is a kind of old-fashioned virtue that most of us don’t appreciate much anymore. But often, your sense of failing in life or having undue hardship is really just a matter of having unrealistic expectations – were you secretly expecting that success would be much, much easier?

Some of the people we’ve covered in the book so far have had impressive lives. But to be fair, we only see the impressive parts. There were times when Carlyle was confused, grumpy, or under the weather. There were times when Beethoven must have been bored or irritated with music. There must have been times when Edison caught a cold or had a fight with a family member that made it hard for him to concentrate that day.

What Sanders can teach us is that, no matter what our goal is, there will be some unglamorous, boring, and unpleasant parts along the way. In fact, this is what the journey to greatness is: mostly not great! The people covered in these chapters are now well-known and respected, but there was a time when they had to act without that recognition. They worked hard before they were successful. So why should we expect to have a path any different? They would have had to put in hours, days, weeks, months, and years of consistent effort without anyone else believing in them and, in some cases, with the world actively pushing against them.

Resilience, then, is not just the ability to endure a momentary humiliation or setback. It’s the strength to know that you will work hard and do what’s required consistently, until the goal is achieved. We can imagine someone travelling back in time and telling all of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs that, one day, they would be rich and successful beyond their wildest dreams. Imagine someone going back in time and telling Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Warren Buffett, “Hey, keep going! You’re on the right path!”

Wouldn’t it be nice to have that for yourself? The truth is that resilient people do actually have it – they have a voice inside them, a conviction that they will get to where they’re going, one way or another. They have faith in themselves and their plans. They have a vision, calling to them from the future. Maybe nobody else sees it yet, but they can. And so, while others are thinking, “Should I even bother? Why carry on with this path if it’s so difficult right now and I’m not even guaranteed a good outcome?” the resilient people are thinking the opposite.

And because they think that way, they create a self-fulfilling prophesy. They work hard because they have convinced themselves it will amount to something. When facing an obstacle, they can still angle their necks and peek around the obstacle, keeping their eyes on what really matters, up ahead in the distance. In this way, they’re resilient. They stick with their commitments.

Colonel Sanders wasn’t necessarily smarter or more talented than others (we can see from his old jobs that he wasn’t!). In fact, he might not have even had an especially good chicken recipe (a heretical statement, maybe). But what he did have was this special kind of conviction that never gave him permission to give up, no matter how many rejections or failures he experienced.

Real world example

Let’s be honest for a moment – achieving wealth and fame is not the only way to make a success of your life. There’s no need to make that your yardstick. But chances are you’ve come to a place in your own life (maybe a milestone birthday?) where you stop and ask what it all amounts to. Getting older gives us a unique opportunity to get real about our priorities, our resources, and how much we’re willing to work for what we want.

There are older people who have figured this out – and those who haven’t. There are likely people in your world right now that have some powerful lessons about resilience to teach, if you are willing to hear them. And these stories don’t have to be epic to have meaning. It may be the uncle that pieced his life back together after losing his wife, the stay-at-home mom who launched an entirely new career at 50 after her children left for university, or the workaholic who realized after a triple bypass that he needed to rethink his lifestyle completely. Talk to the people – their insights may astound you.

Colonel Sanders lessons:

• It’s never too late to start over, no matter how old you are. Colonel Sanders started over in his sixties and still managed to create a business empire that would overtake those he might have considered younger and more talented than him. The past doesn’t define who you are now, and it doesn’t define who you can be in the future.

• Success takes time, and it takes consistent, diligent effort – there are no shortcuts for anyone. You don’t have to be superhuman to be resilient and disciplined. All you need to do is refuse to give up. Don’t pay attention to the flashy success stories you read about in the media – true accomplishment doesn’t happen overnight, so be patient.

• If you’re facing a setback, loss, or disappointment, consider adjusting your expectations. Sometimes being mentally strong and tough is simply a matter of not expecting the important things in life to be easy the first time around!