Most of us enjoy reading recipes for success. The topic of failure tends to be far less popular. And yet, in business we say "If you're not occasionally failing at something, you're probably setting your sights for success way too low." I like Soichiro Honda's quote. Here's a business legend who set very high expectations for himself and his automobile company. Yet he viewed failure in the context of it simply being a necessary means to achieving an outstanding end.
Over the years, I've also grown to appreciate the comparison of two of history's outstanding major league baseball players, Lou Brock and Max Carey. In 1922, Carey played for the Pittsburgh Pirates and stole 51 bases while only being caught twice. That's an unbelievable success rate of 96%! Yet, far 
more of us recognize the name Lou Brock, a St. Louis Cardinal who for many years was the major league career leader in stolen bases with a total of 938 successes. Almost unnoticed in the recordbooks, though, is the fact that Brock was thrown out a total of 307 times in his career. That's a far less impressive career success rate of 76%. Still pretty good, but less than Carey-like. Yet, Brock's the guy people still talk about, not Carey.
What got me thinking again about this whole failure to success sequencing was a post earlier this week by Michael Hyatt, President & CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. Hyatt offers some great reminders that ultimately what determines whether past failures lead to future successes depends more on our individual responses to failure (i.e., how you respond to failure when it happens). Worth reading.
By the way, as I'm sitting here on the couch wrapping up this post, Michael Dyson (yes, the vacuum cleaner guy) was just on TV bragging about how his latest vacuum wonder product was the result of 5,000 earlier prototypes, or as he put it, 5,000 failures. I think these folks are onto something.