Jeff Cornwall, The Entrepreneurial Mind, is also thinking about success and failure: Most highly successful entrepreneurs will tell you that along the road to success in their businesses they were often on the brink of failure. But they persevered. They found a way to make payroll. They found a way to make that critical sale….

“If you stay committed, your dreams can come true. I’m living proof of it. I left home at 17 and had nothing but rejections for 25 years. I wrote more than 20 screenplays, but I never gave up.” — Michael Blake, author of Dances with Wolves small biz rural entrepreneurship

“I’d rather be a failure at something I enjoy than a success at something I hate.”— George Burns small biz rural entrepreneurship success failure

“The only time you don’t fail is the last time you try anything–and it works.”— William Strong So why let an emotionally-charged word define most of our efforts? small biz rural entrepreneurship success failure

“Success is largely a matter of stumbling forward. We fail forward to success. It’s a case of falling forward and getting up whenever you fall down and beginning again. Failure is an inevitable and necessary and a useful part of being successful. Actually we learn more from failing than from succeeding, because failure impresses us…

“Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements, and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end result of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of failure…

Many of us, when we screw up, fail, or are rejected, do two things without thinking: first we cover it up; second, we go right from the “failure” to “I’m worthless!” We take it personally and the learning we take away is to never, ever to get caught in that kind of situation again. The…