Michael Jordan took his failure much more seriously than his success, even though the success was in abundance.
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Jordan is one of the greatest athletes ever. The man did not just change the course for the game of basketball in the entire world for good. He made it one of the most prominent sports globally when it was just famous in and around the States.
The Chicago Bulls’ 6’6 savant, alongside Lakers’ Magic Johnson, Celtics’ Larry Bird, and many other tremendous players from the 80s and 90s, did the most outstanding service to the game. His teaming up with all those future legends for the Gold medal run in the 1992 Olympics helped the game popularise like ever before.
That team is still one of the most star-studded squads of players from a top-tier professional sport which goes by the name of “Dream Team”. Apart from being a delightful event for the entire world to remember forever, that also brought in a lot of endorsements and commercials from the biggest brands.
Nike and Pepsi commercials were among some of the best from that period, which not just made millions for the athletes who were their brand ambassadors and a significant source of entertainment for the fans. In one such legendary Nike commercial Jordan came out with a quote which would later become a success mantra for several people.
A 25-year-old famous quote from Michael Jordan defines his attitude and still makes him 100s of millions every year
In a 1997 commercial for Nike, MJ explained how many shots he has missed in his 11-plus-year career and the games he has lost. The then 5x NBA champ failed far less than most other players but had failed to even make it to the NBA Finals for the first six years of his career.
Even those few failures allowed him to succeed at the highest level during his legendary career in which he made it to three straight NBA Finals on two separate occasions and won every one of those in such exemplary and dominant fashion that he didn’t have to play a single Game 7 in any of those series.
What better way to stay away from failure than winning it every time before it’s all at stake in Game 7s? That man was pure genius and a phenom who, over 15 seasons of one of the most decorated careers, scored 32,292 points on 24,537 attempts.
He made 14x All-Star appearances, 11x All-NBA Teams, 9x All-Defensive First Teams, and won 706 games, 6x championships, 6x Finals MVPs, 5x MVPs, 10x scoring titles, a DPOY and several other accolades, but what bothered him were those 12,345 missed shots and 366 games lost.
That attitude helped him win in life. It was that through which the Charlotte Hornets owner now has a net worth of $2.1 billion, after just making around $94 million on-court by 2003 when he last played in the NBA. Air Jordan along with some of his other investments make him more than $100 million a year nowadays.
