Success story is also a great failure

EVERY SUCCESS STORY IS ALSO A STORY OF GREAT FAILURE

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.