Years before hedge fund titan Paul Tudor Jones learned to brave the ups and downs of financial markets, he got his lesson in coming back from failures while playing sixth grade basketball. Then the smallest and youngest boy on the team, Jones had failed to get a point all year, prompting the coach to ask his teammates to pass him the ball so he could try to score in the last game of the season.

But the other team knew what was going on and blocked Jones at every turn, then celebrated shutting him out ... even though the opposing squad had lost the game. Jones left the gym in tears and hid in the bathroom, but didn’t give up on sports. He eventually found boxing in tenth grade, where as a slightly-built teenager he could finally compete against rivals his own size. Jones thrived as a welterweight boxer, and later boxed on the team at the University of Virginia. But he never forgot his fruitless basketball season. “That failure haunted me even as I won a collegiate boxing championship,” says Jones in an email interview. “But it helped me get there.”

Jones also applied what he learned from his first failure to the nonprofit group Robin Hood, a New York City anti-poverty charity that he cofounded in 1988.

Read the full article about Paul Tudor Jones' life story by Jennifer Wang at Forbes.