Many people are afraid to try new things or take chances because they’re afraid they might fail.  If they only understood the critical role that failure plays in their success, they would definitely change their attitude.  The truth is that it’s impossible to achieve a high level of success without experiencing a fair amount of failure.  As James Dale points out in his book, The Obvious, entrepreneurs fail an average of 3.8 times before they finally succeed.  And, it’s the things they learned from those failures that made their ultimate success possible.  Thomas Watson Sr., the founder of IBM, summed up this relationship between failure and success very accurately when he said: “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”  So, if you want to succeed in a big way, never forget that failure is your best friend.