An early, high-profile failure or rejection is often treated retroactively as an inspiring footnote to eventual success, but the more useful lesson isn't the failure itself — it's the specific response to it. A fixed-mindset response to being told you're not good enough treats the judgment as accurate and permanent; a growth-mindset response treats it as one data point about a specific moment, answerable with more deliberate effort rather than acceptance.
The distinction is what separates a story that's genuinely instructive from one that's just a feel-good anecdote: what mattered wasn't that someone was cut or rejected, it's specifically what they did in the months immediately afterward, which is the part most retellings skip past in favor of the dramatic reversal.