Every Great Man Was Once a Failure

Just before Christmas in 1857, a man walked into a pawnshop in St. Louis, Missouri, and handed over his gold watch for twenty-two dollars, to buy presents for his children. He had resigned from the army under a cloud, failed as a farmer on a patch of land he called Hardscrabble, sold firewood on the streets in his old army coat, and ended up a clerk in his father's leather goods store, taking orders from his younger brothers. His name was Ulysses S. Grant. Less than seven years later, he was commanding every army of the United States. This video is about the invisible years: the long stretch of work that nobody is watching, where almost every great life is actually built. Why every serious man must pass through them, why most men quit in the middle, and how to know if you are standing inside them right now. Told through Grant, the Greek chronos and kairos, Isaac Newton at Woolsthorpe, Charles Darwin and his barnacles, Winston Churchill's wilderness years, Epictetus and the letter from Alfred Russel Wallace. Topics covered: Grant and the pawnshop (1857) | From Hardscrabble to the presidency | Chronos and kairos | The moment does not make the man | Newton's plague years at Woolsthorpe | Darwin's twenty-one years | Churchill's wilderness years | Why preparation looks like failure | Why most men quit: effort without receipts | Epictetus and the fig | Measure in years, not weeks | Keep a private record | Accept the humiliation | The trap: preparing forever | Grant's last race: the memoirs SOURCES Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (1885) · Ron Chernow, Grant (2017) · Isaac Newton's annus mirabilis (1665–1666) and the Principia (1687) · Charles Darwin, Autobiography; Notebooks 1837–1839; On the Origin of Species (1859) · Alfred Russel Wallace, letter to Darwin (June 1858) · Winston Churchill's "wilderness years" (1929–1939) · Epictetus, Discourses 1.15 ARTWORK & FOOTAGE Public-domain works by Leon Pomarede, Pieter Claesz, John Haberle, Viggo Johansen, Henry James Warre, John Lewis Krimmel, George Henry Durrie, Winslow Homer, George Caleb Bingham, Edward Lamson Henry, Washington Allston, Thure de Thulstrup, Ole Peter Hansen Balling, Hubert von Herkomer, Caspar David Friedrich, Adam de Coster, Georges de La Tour, Thomas Cole, Georg Emil Libert, Leo von Klenze, Giulio Bonasone, Giulio Romano, Nicolas Poussin, Francesco Salviati, Emanuel Leutze, Kurz & Allison, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Abraham Storck, Joseph Wright of Derby, Edward Moran, David Loggan, Jan Siberechts, Jacob van Ruisdael, Domenico Fetti, Gerrit Dou, Andreas Cellarius, Conrad Martens, Carl Spitzweg, Robert Walter Weir, John Gould, Karl Wagner, Claude Monet, J. M. W. Turner, Heinrich Gogarten, Edvard Munch, Martin Johnson Heade, Evelyn De Morgan, Ivan Kramskoi, Paul Nash, Juan Antonio de Ribera, John Pettie, Johannes Schoeff, Vincent van Gogh, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Jean-François Millet, John William Waterhouse, Elihu Vedder, January Suchodolski, Léon Lhermitte, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Caravaggio, Quentin Massys, Marinus van Reymerswaele, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Raphael, Michael Burghers, Franz Xaver Petter, Luis Meléndez, Johan Christian Dahl, Adriaen Coorte, Amélie Lundahl, Valentin de Boulogne, Roelof van Vries, Albrecht Dürer, Domenico Remps, James de Carle Sowerby, Johannes Vermeer, Gabriel Metsu, Jean Fouquet, George Hendrik Breitner, Sawrey Gilpin, Filippo Gherardi, Robert Wallis, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, William Hogarth, Meindert Hobbema, Masaccio, Eugène Delacroix, Thomas W. Wood, Jules Breton, Alexei Savrasov, Claude Lorrain, Joos de Momper the Younger, Jozef Israëls, Schell and Hogan, Emmery Rondahl, Gonzales Coques, Nathaniel Currier, Jean Henri Marlet, Eastman Johnson, George Peter Alexander Healy, Pietro Paolini, John Atkinson Grimshaw, Godfried Schalcken, Thomas Le Clear, Godfrey Kneller, George Richmond, John Lavery and others, via Wikimedia Commons, the Rijksmuseum, the Library of Congress and the Wellcome Collection. Mihály Munkácsy, The Pawnbroker's Shop, photo by Dguendel, CC BY 4.0. Sebastian Stoskopff, Still Life with Table Clock, photo by Ji-Elle, CC BY-SA 3.0. Rembrandt, Philosopher in Meditation, photo by Sailko, CC BY 3.0. Plague in London, 1665, Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0. Giuseppe and Domenico Valeriani and Giambattista Pittoni, An Allegorical Monument to Sir Isaac Newton, Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0. John Robert Brown, The House of Charles Darwin (Down House) in Kent, wood engraving, Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0. Darwin: The Study at Down, Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0. Christian Gottfried Schultze after Charles François Hutin, An Elderly Man with a Skull and an Hourglass, Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0. Gholamhossein Saber, Fig Tree, CC BY-SA 4.0. Night sky time-lapse: ESO (CC BY 4.0). MUSIC Original score by Flumera. #philosophy #discipline #ulyssesgrant