Buckminster Fuller said that parents kill off the genius of their children by making them afraid of making mistakes. When you're afraid of making mistakes, you initiate fewer actions, and when you initiate fewer actions you don't fail as much, but you also don't learn as much. Being afraid of making mistakes prevents you from becoming as good as you could be. That must be why Thomas Watson said, "The way to succeed is to double your failure rate."

Watson was working for a company called National Cash Register, otherwise known as NCR, when he was fired. This was a failure. But he vowed that he would develop a company that would dwarf NCR some day. He went on to create a company called International Business Machines, otherwise known as IBM.

Watson once gave some advice to a writer who was discouraged because so many publishers had rejected his manuscripts. Watson told him, "You're making a common mistake. You're thinking of failure as the enemy of success. Every one of those manuscripts was rejected for a reason. Have you pulled them to pieces looking for a reason? You've got to put failure to work for you. Go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember, that's where you'll find success — on the far side of failure."

"Fear nothing," said Katherine Tingley, "for every renewed effort raises all former failures into lessons, all sins into experience." Every time you pick yourself up and try again, you transform your failure into a lesson. Remember that quote as you listen to an ironic true story of a clergyman in his fifties.

One of the major goals of this clergyman was to get his manuscript published as a book. He kept sending it to publishers, but all he got back were rejection notices. One day he finally had it. He gave up. In defeat, he threw his manuscript in the trash.

His wife knew how much that manuscript meant to him, so she reached into the wastebasket to pull it out. "We've wasted enough time on it," he told his wife, "I forbid you to take it out of there."

The next day she was thinking about it and she got an idea. She took the manuscript, still inside the wastebasket, to another publisher on her own. The publisher was intrigued by this unusual way to bring in a manuscript, so he read it. And he published it. And boy is he glad he did! The book sold 15 million copies and is still selling. The clergyman is none other than Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. The book is The Power of Positive Thinking. Good thing for Norman his wife used the power of positive thinking and didn't give up.

You know what kills a lot of aspirations? Impatience. Big obstacles didn't kill the dream. Impatience did."