All success stories are stories of great failures. The only difference is that every time they failed, they bounced back. This is called failing forward, rather than backward. You learn and move forward. Learn from your failure and keep moving.

The third avatar of Vishnu, the boar, signifies the same. The answer is persistence in your objectives.

Here are few quotes and success stories:

1. “So never mind these failures, these little backslidings; hold the ideal a thousand times, and if you fail a thousand times, make the attempt once more. The ideal of man is to see God in everything”. II.152 (Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda)
2. “It is in the nature of things that many should fall, that troubles should come, that tremendous difficulties should arise, that selfishness and all other devils in the human heart should struggle hard, when they are about to be driven out by the fire of spirituality. The road to good is the roughest and the steepest in the universe. It is a wonder that so many succeed; no wonder that so many fall. Character has to be established through a thousand stumbles”. VIII.383 (C W of SV)
3. “Therefore, stand up, be bold, be strong. Take the whole responsibility on your own shoulders, and know that you are the creator of your own destiny”. II.225 (CW of SV).
4. “Successful people don’t do great things, they only do small things in a great way”
5. “One day a partially deaf four year old kid came home with a note in his pocket from his teacher, “Your Tommy is too stupid to learn, get him out of the school.” His mother read the note and answered, “My Tommy is not stupid to learn, I will teach him myself.” And that Tommy grew up to be the great Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison had only three months of formal schooling and he was partially deaf”.
6. “Henry Ford forgot to put the reverse gear in the first car he made”.
7. “Thomas Edison failed approximately 10,000 times while he was working on the light bulb”
8. “Henry Ford was broke at the age of 40”.
9. “Lee Iacocca was fired by Henry Ford II at the age of 54”.
10. “Young Beethoven was told that he had no talent for music, but he gave some of the best music to the world”

(With inputs from Dr Vivek Chhabra and Ravi Ponangi)

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this write up are my own).