For many an entrepreneur, wholly unglamorous stuff—poverty, chores, embarrassing losses—has been the key to later success.
We speak of looking up to people we admire. And so often, when we look up to successful people in our line of work, it seems like they must have always been at the top. But the reality is so often the very opposite. As Fast Company has learned by interviewing a variety of creative and successful people over the past year, failure often contains the seeds of success. Indeed, some of the most successful people started out at the very, very bottom—in a slum or tiny village, even—and still treasure the lessons they learned from those years.
So if you’ve been stuck at the bottom in some sense in 2015, try looking at it as a blessing in disguise. Here are six ways to embrace and learn from adversity.