Most of us know Babe Ruth set a record with 714 home runs in his baseball career. But few remember he struck out 1,330 times on the way to that record. Most people know Jonas Salk discovered the polio vaccine, but few realize he had to fail two hundred times before he found the right one. 

          Nearly everyone who watches professional basketball agrees Michael Jordan is one of the greatest players of all time. But most people don't realize he failed to make the basketball team his sophomore year in high school. He didn't quit playing because of one failure. 

          Henry Ford went bankrupt five times before he finally succeeded. Thomas Edison failed over ten thousand times in his attempts to find the correct filament for the light bulb. When an aide urged him to quit after several hundred failures, he replied, "Why quit now? We know of at least a hundred things that won't work." 

          Learning from our failures is part of the process of being successful. None of these people could have accomplished what they did if they had listened to the fear of failure. (Kent Crockett, The 911 Handbook, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003, 69)