Bill Withers

What failed

He came to music late: he left the Navy in 1965 after nine years, moved to Los Angeles in 1967, the year he turned twenty-nine, to start a music career, and released a first single, "Three Nights and a Morning", that went unnoticed. He was writing songs while working a factory floor, and refused to resign the job when "Ain't No Sunshine" became a hit in 1971, on the grounds that the music business was a fickle industry; Weber Aircraft laid him off anyway. Running battles with label executives over control of his sound then ended his recording career in 1985. He never released another album.

What happened next

His first album gave him a standard and a Grammy. Its cover shows him at the factory holding his lunch box. In one day in 1971 he received two letters: his old employer offering his mechanic's job back at three dollars fifty an hour, and a television show asking him to come and sing. He later chose to stop making records rather than make ones he did not want to make.

The point

He started late, hedged his bets, and later chose silence over compromise. Both the starting and the stopping were his own decisions, which is the whole point.