When I'm Discouraged . . .

I think about these famous people:

• Jack London received six hundred rejection slips before he sold his first story.
• Leo Tolstoy flunked out of college. He was described as both "unable and unwilling to learn." No doubt a slow developer.
  
• Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, was encouraged to find work as a servant by her family.
• Emily Dickinson had only seven poems published in her lifetime.
• Eighteen publishers turned down Richard Bach's story about a "soaring eagle." Macmillan finally published Jonathan Livingston Seagull in 1970. By 1975 it had sold more than 7 million copies in the U.S. alone.
  
• Twenty-one publishers rejected Richard Hooker's humorous war novel, M*A*S*H. He had worked on it for seven years.
  
• Twenty-two publishers rejected James Joyce's The Dubliners.
• Twenty-seven publishers rejected Dr. Seuss's first book, To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.
• English crime novelist John Creasey got 753 rejection slips before he published 564 books.
• William Saroyan accumulated more than a thousand rejections before he had his first literary piece published. Way to not take a hint, Bill!
• Gertude Stein submitted poems to editors for nearly 20 years before one was finally accepted. See . . . a rose is a rose.
• I bet you didn't know that John Milton wrote Paradise Lost 16 years after losing his eyesight.
  
• One of Professor Pajares's first research efforts came back with a review that began, "There are so many things I don't like about this article I just don't know where to begin."
• A professor at MIT offers a course on failure. He does that, he says, because failure is a far more common experience than success. An interviewer once asked him if anybody ever failed the course on failure. He thought a moment and replied, "No, but there were two Incompletes."
  

Quote:
Only those who dare to fail greatly can achieve greatly. ~ Robert F. Kennedy


Blessings