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The Dalai Lama once said: "Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck". This philosophy extends to all aspects of life, and it certainly resounds with a great deal of clarity in the business world.

The simple difference between a successful business person and the person who just gets by is often their propensity to work through failure. There are very few top CEOs, inventors, engineers or researchers who made it to the upper echelons without failing numerous times. In fact, most people who are highly regarded in their fields have often failed spectacularly more times than they have succeeded.

There are numerous examples of people who have often worked their way through proverbial bushels of lemons before coming up with a glass of the good stuff. Some of the most noted 'failures' include:

-Thomas Edison. Edison was fired from his first career as a telegraph operator after spilling sulfuric acid on his boss's desk. As an inventor, he strove for years to develop a working incandescent bulb and then spent over a decade - and all of his valuable General Electric stock - on trying to develop a viable separator for mining iron ore. Edison was known for both his tenacity and his ability to move forward despite many serious set backs. Once when he was asked about his many failed attempts to create a storage battery, he shrugged off the tone of the question with this response: "I have not failed. I have merely found 10,000 ways that won't work." He is also famous for observing that "Many of life's failures are men who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up".

-James Dyson. Dyson is famous for his 'bagless cyclone vacuum' system that recently revolutionized the industry. By his own estimation, Dyson built 5,127 prototypes of his vacuum before finally coming up with a model that was commercially viable. He was in debt when he started his company in 1979...today he is worth an estimated $1 billion dollars. In a 2006 Forbes magazine interview, Dyson observed:
"...I learned that the moment you want to slow down is the moment you should accelerate. In long distance running, you go through a pain barrier. The same thing happens in research and development projects, or in starting any business. There's a terrible moment when failure is staring you in the face. And actually if you persevere a bit longer you'll start to climb out of it."

-Walt Disney. The man who made 'imagineering' possible was fired by the editor of the

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