Introduction

If at first you don't succeed, welcome to the club. You'll be delighted to learn that you're in excellent company. Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, the Beatles, Thomas Edison, Madonna, Benjamin Franklin--they all had major failures when they started out.

It all goes to show that failure is simply a minor stumbling block on the road to success. Of course, you might not necessarily be on the right road--but you can always get off at the next exit and ask for directions. Sure, failure can make you bury your head under the covers, sleep till noon, and then lounge around your mobile home in a smelly old bathrobe, taking swigs from a bottle of Southern Comfort to wash down a box of day-old powdered jelly donuts. But failure also builds character, helps you hone your skills, tests your determination, fortifies you with eight essential vitamins, and gives you the inner strength and courage to go back out there and fall flat on your face all over again.

Take pride in your failures--because you can't possibly succeed unless you have the courage to fail. When Thomas Edison's experiments with a storage battery failed to produce any positive results, the inventor refused to concede defeat. "I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Anyone who's anybody has failed, and knowing that can be encouraging and uplifting. And so, as a public service, here are the famous successes who were once failures, losers, drop-outs, flunkies, suckers, saps, schlemiels, and schlemazels. They all looked failure square in the face and spit in its eye. You can too. Just remember, everyone falls down. You're not a failure until you don't get back up.

Marilyn Monroe was dropped in 1947 by Twentieth Century-Fox after one year under contract because production chief Darryl Zanuck thought she was unattractive.

Marilyn Monroe became a Hollywood sex goddess, starring in All About Eve, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot, and The Misfits .

Dr. Seuss's first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected by twenty-seven publishing houses, and Seuss considered burning the manuscript.

Dr. Seuss became the author of more than forty best-selling children's books, including The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, Horton the Elephant, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins .

Cary Grant was called to the stage during an assembly in 1918 and publicly expelled from Fairfield Secondary School for sneaking into the girls lavatory.

Cary Grant became a leading man in movies, starring in more than seventy films, most notably Topper, Bringing Up Baby, Gunga Din, The Philadelphia Story, and North by Northwest .

Barbra Streisand made her stage debut at age nineteen in 1961 in the off-Broadway revue Another Evening with Harry Stoones . The show opened and closed in a single night.

Barbra Streisand became the top-selling female recording artist in the world and starred in the films Funny Girl, Hello Dolly!, The Way We Were, A Star Is Born, and Yentl .

Copyright © 2001 Joey Green. All rights reserved.