I came
across a website, “Want to know info” which had inspirational stories. http://www.wanttoknow.info/060520inspirationalstories
There were multiple examples of failure turned into success. Many I had read
before, but this was such an excellent collection I  recommend it to you. The website says the stories
were compiled from two excellent books by Jack
Canfield and Mark Hansen: Chicken Soup for the Writer's Soul and A Cup of Chicken Soup for the Soul Here
are some examples that were described.

 

 

• Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he finally succeeded.

• Beethoven handled the violin
  awkwardly and preferred playing his own compositions instead of improving his
  technique. His teacher called him hopeless as a composer.

• Colonel Sanders had the construction
  of a new road put him out of business in 1967. He went to over 1,000 places
  trying to sell his chicken recipe before he found a buyer interested in his 11
  herbs and spices. Seven years later, at the age of 75, Colonel Sanders sold his
  fried chicken company for a finger-lickin' $15 million!

• Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper
  editor for lack of ideas. Disney also went bankrupt several times before he
  built Disneyland.

• Charles Darwin, father of the theory
  of evolution, gave up a medical career and was told by his father, "You
  care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat catching." In his
  autobiography, Darwin wrote, "I was considered by my father, a very
  ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect.

• Albert Einstein did not speak until
  he was four years old and didn't read until he was seven. His teacher described
  him as "mentally slow, unsociable and adrift forever in his foolish
  dreams." He was expelled and refused admittance to Zurich Polytechnic
  School. The University of Bern turned down his Ph.D. dissertation as being
  irrelevant and fanciful.

• The movie Star Wars was rejected by
  every movie studio in Hollywood before 20th-Century Fox finally produced it. It
  went on to be one of the largest grossing movies in film history.

• Louis Pasteur was only a mediocre
  pupil in undergraduate studies and ranked 15 out of 22 in chemistry.

• When NFL running back Herschel
  Walker was in junior high school, he wanted to play football, but the coach
  told him he was too small. He advised young Herschel to go out for track
  instead. Never one to give up, he ignored the coach's advice and began an
  intensive training program to build himself up. Only a few years later,
  Herschel Walker won the Heisman trophy.

• When General Douglas MacArthur
  applied for admission to West Point, he was turned down, not once but twice.
  But he tried a third time, was accepted and marched into the history books.

• After Fred Astaire's first screen
  test, the memo from the testing director of MGM, dated 1933, said, "Can't
  act! Slightly bald! Can dance a little!" Astaire kept that memo over the
  fireplace in his Beverly Hills home.

• Eighteen publishers turned down
  Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull, before Macmillan finally
  published it in 1970. By 1975 it had sold more than seven million copies in the
  U.S. alone.

• Margaret Mitchell's classic Gone
  with the Wind was turned down by more than twenty-five publishers.

• Richard Hooker worked for seven
  years on his humorous war novel, M*A*S*H, only to have it rejected by 21
  publishers before Morrow decided to publish it. It became a runaway bestseller,
  spawning a blockbusting movie and highly successful television series.

• In 1954, Jimmy Denny, manager of the
  Grand Ole Opry, fired Elvis Presley after one performance. He told Presley,
  "You ain't goin' nowhere… son. You ought to go back to drivin' a
  truck." Elvis Presley went on to become the most popular singer in
  America.

• Dr. Seuss' first children's book, And
  to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, was rejected by twenty-seven
  publishers. The twenty-eighth publisher, Vanguard press, sold six million
  copies of the book.