General Douglas MacArthur was denied admission to the Military Academy at West Point, not once but twice. When he tried for the third time, he was accepted and marched right into our history books.

Basketball superstar, Michael Jordan, was cut from his high school basketball team.

Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade. He became England’s Prime Minister at the age of 62, after a lifetime of defeats and new beginnings. His greatest contribution came when he was a senior citizen.

Albert Einstein did not speak until he was four years old and didn’t learn how to read until he was seven. His teacher described him as “mentally slow, unsociable and adrift forever in his foolish dreams.” He was expelled and was refused admittance to the Zurich Polytechnic School in Switzerland.

In 1944, Emmeline Snively, director of the Blue Book Modeling Agency, told modeling hopeful Norman Jean Baker (Marilyn Monroe), “You’d better learn secretarial work or else get married.”

An executive from Decca Records turned down a recording contract with an English rock band called the Beatles and said, “We don’t like their sound. Guitar groups are on their way out.”

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, it didn’t ring off the hook with calls from potential backers. President Rutherford Hayes said, “It’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to see one of them?”

When Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he tried over two thousand experiments before he got it to work. A young reporter asked him how it felt to fail so many times. Edison replied, “I never failed once. I invented the light bulb. It just happened to be a 2,000-step process.”

After years of progressive hearing loss, by age 46 German composer Ludwig van Beethoven had become completely deaf. Nevertheless, he wrote his greatest music, including three symphonies, during his later years.

Therefore, we must never think that our time is up. There’s always something new to learn while we’re here.

Maybe, none of these people had the faith we do, but yet, they still made history.