It's a rare person who doesn't get discouraged. Whether is happens to us or to an associate we're trying to cheer up, the answer centers around one word: perseverance.
- Robert Frost, one of the greatest poets that America has produced, labored for twenty years without fame or success. He was 39 years old before he sold a single volume of poetry. Today his poems have been published in some twenty-two languages and he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times.
- When Enrico Caruso, the great Italian tenor, took his first voice lesson, the instructor pronounced him hopeless. He said his voice sounded like wind whistling through a window.
- Walt Disney was once fired by a newspaper editor for lack of imagination. Disney once recalled his early DAYs of failure: "When I was nearly twenty-one years old I went broke for the first time. I slept on cushions from an old sofa and ate cold beans out of a can."
- Gregor Mendel, the Austrian botanist whose experiments with peas originated the modern science of genetics, never even succeeded in passing the examination to become a high school science teacher. He failed biology.
- Woody Allen flunked a motion picture production course at the City College of New York. Leon Uris, writer of one of the most popular novels of this century, Exodus, failed English three times in high school.
- Everyone who makes a major contribution to life knows what it is to have failures. Indeed, early failures can be a major contributor to later successes.
The value of courage, persistence, and perseverance has rarely been illustrated more convincingly than in the life story of this man (his age appears in the column on the right):
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| Achievement | Age |
| Failed in business | 22 |
| Ran for legislature - defeated | 23 |
| Again failed in business | 24 |
| Elected to legislature | 25 |
| Sweetheart died | 26 |
| Had a nervous breakdown | 27 |
| Defeated for Speaker | 29 |
| Defeated for Elector | 31 |
| Defeated for Congress | 34 |
| Elected to Congress | 37 |
| Defeated for Congress | 39 |
| Defeated for Congress | 46 |
| Defeated for Vice President | 47 |
| Defeated for Senate | 49 |
| Elected President of the United States | 51 |
| ...that's the record of Abraham Lincoln |
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Published in borderlesscity.com
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