“I’m no good at Spanish.” “I’ll never make the team.” Sometimes, teens try things and don’t succeed. If you’re looking for some inspirations to keep your teen going, try these true stories:

• Dr. Seuss’s first book, And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected by 23 publishers.
• Louisa May Alcott was told by an editor that she’d never be able to write anything that would appeal to the public.
• Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school basketball team.
• At the first TV station that hired her, Oprah Winfrey was assigned to be a reporter. She failed. So the station assigned her to a morning talk show.
• Charles Darrow was unemployed when he invented the game Monopoly. He brought it to a toy company, and they gave him 52 reasons for rejecting it. Today, the toy’s manufacturer prints more than $40 billion in Monopoly money each year (that’s twice as much as the U.S. Mint prints).

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