To double your success rate, you must double your failure rate. -Thomas Edison

My sister, Maureen, an aspiring children's writer, giggles with glee any time a rejection letter lands in her mailbox. I was at her house one day and witnessed her reaction, which puzzled me.

She'd been sending out sporadic queries to children's publishers for quite a while, trying to find a suitable home for her collection of short stories, but her efforts up until then had produced only a sizable mound of "thanks but no thanks" letters. I thought her luck had changed.

"Yes!" she crowed as she read the editor's scribbled note at the bottom of the form letter.

"What?" I asked in anticipation. "Good news? One of your stories got accepted?" I was all ready to do my happy dance when her look of scorn stopped me.

"No," she sniffed, "they say the content is a bit over the heads of their average reader. But they want me to send more of my stories for consideration. Isn't that great?"

I didn't think it was so great, but I tried to keep my tone light when I asked her why she seemed to relish such a negative response.

"Because, don't you see? I'm that much closer to getting published now. By the time someone accepts my stories, I'll know exactly how many rejections it takes to get published."

Okay. Talk about an optimist. Instead of giving up on her goal, my sister saw the setbacks as fuel for her fire. As soon as she received one of those "inspirations" in the mail, she sat down and sent out a flurry of fresh queries to a new batch of publishers. She knew that, by giving up, she would only succeed at failing. From her viewpoint, that first unmade attempt might have been the one to hit the mark, so she cheerfully persisted in her efforts.

How many times would you try something and fail before giving up? Would you forever wonder "what if?" There's truth in the clich