Julie Andrews, 90-year-old actress: "Perseverance is failing 19 times and succeeding the 20th"
The legendary actress' words carry weight after a career that required triumph and reinvention
J ulie Andrews ' career is filled with the kind of achievements that can make success look effortless as from the stage of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music , she became one of the most recognizable performers of her generation. The quote most closely associated with her view of resilience focuses not on success itself, however, but on the repeated failures that often come before it.
"Perseverance is failing 19 times and succeeding the 20th," Andrews once said, and the message is deliberately simple: Failure is not valuable because it feels good or because every setback automatically leads somewhere better. It matters because continuing after disappointment is often what separates a temporary defeat from a lasting one. That distinction is why the quote has remained relevant across careers, education, creative work and personal goals - and the lesson became more profound later in Andrews ' own career.
Andrews' own life gave the words additional meaning
After developing an exceptional singing voice as a child and building a celebrated musical career around it, she then faced one of her most devastating setbacks in the late 1990s. Surgery on her vocal cords severely affected her ability to sing and a career built partly on one of the most famous voices in entertainment was quickly threatened with ending. But Andrews responded emphatically as she found other ways to work, expanding her range to include written works along with continuing to act on the screen and in voice roles. Demonstrating that perseverance is not always about recovering exactly what had been lost, sometimes it means building something different to what came before - and this is what makes the "19 times" element so important. The number is less a literal formula than a way of describing the accumulated frustration that comes from rejection, mistakes and repeated attempts that appear to go nowhere. Success from the 20th attempt only matters because the first 19 did not end the effort, particularly poignant as modern society often compresses success into the moment that somebody finally breaks through. The failed auditions, abandoned ideas and rejected applications usually receive far less attention, and Andrews ' quote aims to cut through that tendency but putting the unsuccessful attempts at the center of the story. It also avoids pretending that perseverance guarantees a perfect outcome: People can work hard and still fall short. Circumstances change, opportunities can slip away and some goals have to be reconsidered. But the point is that failure itself does not have to make that decision and at 90, Andrews ' career offers a perfect example of that principle in action.
