Famous Failures: Hundreds of Hot Shots Who Got Rejected, Flunked Out, Worked Lousy Jobs, Goofed Up, or Did Time in Jail Before Achieving Phenomenal Success

by Joey Green

Just graduated with no prospects whatsoever? Been fired from your job? Rejected from a snazzy college? Looking for that next big break but coming up empty handed? Fear not, you’re in excellent company . . .  • Albert Einstein failed the entrance exams to the Swiss Polytechnic Institute.• J. K. Rowling lived on welfare in an apartment infested with mice.• Muhammad Ali graduated 376th from a high school class of 391 students.• Julia Roberts auditioned for All My Children but didn’t get the part.• Dick Cheney flunked out of Yale University—twice.• And hundreds more! Each page of Famous Failures features a headline revealing the major failure of a person who later became phenomenally successful, and the smaller type at the bottom of each page explains that person's remarkable achievements. It all goes to show that no one has made the climb to the top without encountering an avalanche along the way. Reading just a few pages of this book makes you want to go back out there and try, try again. 

288 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2007

About the author

Joey Green, a former contributing editor to National Lampoon and a former advertising copywriter at J. Walter Thompson, is the author of more than sixty (yes, sixty) books, including Not So Normal Norbert with James Patterson, Last-Minute Travel Secrets, Last-Minute Survival Secrets, Contrary to Popular Belief, Clean It! Fix It! Eat It!, the best-selling Joey Green's Magic Brands series, The Mad Scientist Handbook series, The Zen of Oz, and You Know You've Reached Middle Age If...—to name just a few.

Joey has appeared on dozens of national television shows, including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Good Morning America, and The View. He has been profiled in the New York Times, People magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today, and he has been interviewed on hundreds of radio shows.

A native of Miami, Florida, and a graduate of Cornell University—where he was the political cartoonist on the Cornell Daily Sun and founded the campus humor magazine, the Cornell Lunatic (still publishing to this very day)—Joey lives in Los Angeles.