When looking at someone like Dr Seuss who kept trying after numerous failures, you also have to consider that there's an opportunity cost to doing what he did. Note: his story "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" was rejected 27 times before being accepted: https://www.npr.org/2012/01/24/145471724/how-dr-seuss-got-hi... Maybe if he'd been rejected 100 times, it would have been worth thinking about trying something else?

Also, if you follow the above link, you find that Dr Seuss admitted it was sheer luck that he got published. He was ready to give up! '"He bumped into a friend ... who had just become an editor at a publishing house in the children's section," McLain explains. Geisel told the friend that he'd simply given up and planned to destroy the book, but the editor asked to take a look... "He said if he had been walking down the other side of the street, he probably would never have become a children's author," McLain says.'

I'm guessing, but I'd think that for most people, getting rejected after trying the _same thing_ 100 times probably means that your product is not good. So giving up after some reasonable number of tries, and pursuing _something else_, is often the better course. If you have nothing better to do, and don't mind failing in the end, then you can keep trying, too!

The problem then is trying to figure out when to quit, and when to keep trying at the same thing. Some people have faith in themselves because they know that their product is great. But it's hard to tell the difference between justified self-confidence and unjustified self-delusion.

From what I've heard and read there are several occupations, comedian and writer immediately come to mind, where the advice is "if you can do literally anything else, do that. If not, you might make it in this business in a decade or so. But probably not."

> What everyone seems to forget is the truth that a successful person is one who failed a lot and just tried one more time

Consider, too, measuring every person based on their deviance from the norm. (For sake of argument, imagine a one-dimensional measure.) By definition, these would be the only people capable of shifting the norm. Ex ante it is impossible–based purely on consensus seeking–to discern the mad from the brilliant.

>What everyone seems to forget is the truth that a successful person is one who failed a lot and just tried one more time. For example - Dr Seuss was rejected by 100 publishers before he found one that said yes. What's the important part of that story? He kept trying.

So, what percentage of those that kept trying eventually succeeded? Aren't there people who kept trying forever and didn't get anywhere and then they died?

And inversely, aren't there people who succeeded without even trying, from their first venture? In fact, what failures did Zuckerberg built before FB, Jobs before Apple, Gates before Microsoft, Brin and co before Google? For all of them their success was on their very first venture...