I wanna thank everyone who ever told me no, Pack it up and get back home, It kept me going knowin' I would prove them wrong. Yea I knew it all along, Without 'm I might have given up a long time ago, and so, I wanna thank everyone who ever told me no. [Buddy Jewell]

Because we live in Nashville, I am often reminded of how much failure goes into creating success. From the outside, it seems that music stars just suddenly appear on the scene. The truth is that for most of them it took years of hard work and many, many failures to finally find success.

The same is true for entrepreneurs. 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. They found a way to keep the wolves away from the door just long enough to make it through the tough times. They found a way to pick themselves up from a business that did not succeed and move on to the next one that might. As Thomas Edison once said, "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." . . .