See How Others Learned from Mistakes Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison tried two thousand different materials in search of a filament for the light bulb. When none worked satisfactorily, his assistant complained, "All our work is in vain. We have learned nothing."

Edison replied very confidently, "Oh, we have come a long way and we have learned a lot. We now that there are two thousand elements which we cannot use to make a good light bulb."

Willie Stargell
As you think about your answers to these questions, it might be helpful to consider the words of Willie Stargell, a Hall-of-Fame baseball player for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who was asked in a PARADE Magazine article after his retirement what he thought baseball had taught him. His answer is very revealing and captures the positive mindset of a successful person. He said:

"Baseball taught me what I need to survive in the world. The game has given me the patience to learn and succeed. As much as I was known for my homers, I also was known for my strikeouts. The strikeout is the ultimate failure. I struck out 1,936 times. But I'm proud of my strikeouts, for I feel that to succeed, one must first fail; the more you fail, the more you learn about succeeding. The person who has never tried and failed will never succeed. Each time I walked away from the plate after a strikeout, I learned something, whether it was about my swing, not seeing the ball, the pitcher or the weather conditions, I learning something. My success is the product of the knowledge extracted from my failures."