Failure is the highway to success. Tom Watson Sr. said,
"If you want to succeed, double your failure rate." If you study
history, you will find that all stories of success are also stories of great
failures. But people don't see the failures. They only see one side of the
picture and they say that person got lucky: "He must have been at the
right place at the right time."
Let me share someone's life history with you. This was a man who failed in
business at the age of 21 ; was defeated in a legislative race at age 22;
failed again in business at age 24; overcame the death of his sweetheart at age
26; had a nervous breakdown at age 27; lost a congressional race at age 34;
lost a senatorial race at age 45; failed in an effort to become vice-president
at age 47; lost a senatorial race at age 49; and was elected president of the
United States at age 52.
This man was Abraham Lincoln.
Would you call him a failure? He could have quit. But to Lincoln, defeat was a
detour and not a dead end.
In 1913, Lee De Forest, inventor of the triodes tube, was charged by the
district attorney for using fraudulent means to mislead the public into buying
stocks of his company by claiming that he could transmit the human voice across
the Atlantic. He was publicly humiliated. Can you imagine where we would be
without his invention?

A New York Times editorial on December 10, 1903, questioned the wisdom of the
Wright Brothers who were trying to invent a machine, heavier than air, that
would fly. One week later, at Kitty Hawk, the Wright Brothers took their famous
flight.
Colonel Sanders, at age 65, with a beat-up car and a $100 check from Social
Security, realized he had to do something. He remembered his mother's recipe
and went out selling. How many doors did he have to knock on before he got his
first order? It is estimated that he had knocked on more than a thousand doors
before he got his first order. How many of us quit after three tries, ten
tries, a hundred tries, and then we say we tried as hard as we could?