To double your success rate, you must double your failure rate. -Thomas Edison

My sister, Maureen, an aspiring children's writer, giggles with glee any time a rejection letter lands in her mailbox. I was at her house one day and witnessed her reaction, which puzzled me.

She'd been sending out sporadic queries to children's publishers for quite a while, trying to find a suitable home for her collection of short stories, but her efforts up until then had produced only a sizable mound of "thanks but no thanks" letters. I thought her luck had changed.

"Yes!" she crowed as she read the editor's scribbled note at the bottom of the form letter.

"What?" I asked in anticipation. "Good news? One of your stories got accepted?" I was all ready to do my happy dance when her look of scorn stopped me.

"No," she sniffed, "they say the content is a bit over the heads of their average reader. But they want me to send more of my stories for consideration. Isn't that great?"

I didn't think it was so great, but I tried to keep my tone light when I asked her why she seemed to relish such a negative response.

"Because, don't you see? I'm that much closer to getting published now. By the time someone accepts my stories, I'll know exactly how many rejections it takes to get published."

Okay. Talk about an optimist. Instead of giving up on her goal, my sister saw the setbacks as fuel for her fire. As soon as she received one of those "inspirations" in the mail, she sat down and sent out a flurry of fresh queries to a new batch of publishers. She knew that, by giving up, she would only succeed at failing. From her viewpoint, that first unmade attempt might have been the one to hit the mark, so she cheerfully persisted in her efforts.

How many times would you try something and fail before giving up? Would you forever wonder "what if?" There's truth in the clich, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again," except the old proverb doesn't go far enough in its philosophy. If you keep trying something in the same way over and over again, it stands to reason that you're going to keep getting the same results.

Consider the following story I heard at a Shifting Paradigms workshop:

A fly zooms into the living room through the open front door and buzzes around aimlessly for a few minutes before attempting to make his getaway. He spies a window on the other side of the room and crashes right into it. The window is closed. Undaunted, the fly continues banging headlong into that window until finally he falls down dead on the windowsill. On the other side of the room, the front door still stands wide open.

The moral of the story: flies can't change their paradigms, or their pattern of thinking and behaving, but we humans, the higher lifeform, can. Therefore, if something doesn't work one way, we need to try another. Discovering what will work often means eliminating the ways that don't.

For example, if you've been trying to lose weight, but the diet/starvation routine isn't working, you might try starting an exercise program instead. Allow yourself to eat your favorite foods (in moderation, of course) so you don't feel deprived, but ratchet up your metabolism through exercise.

Or maybe you've tried exercising, but jogging and stationary biking hurts your knees or you hate that particular activity. Then try swimming or walking instead.

The key is to follow your instincts. If you lock yourself into a regimen that makes you uncomfortable, chances are you'll get discouraged and simply give up. However, success can be yours if you try, try again, but in a different way if the first way doesn't work. We must be willing to adapt our patterns of behavior or our way of thinking if we're going to accomplish our goals.

Conversely, if we start off toward our goal, full of ambition and passion, and then discover we really don't want to achieve that goal (think: changing majors in college), we must be willing to cut our losses and change our tack, reset our navigational instruments to find a new goal.

This isn't giving up out of discouragement; it's allowing ourselves the freedom to follow our instincts. You can tell the difference by how you feel when you make the choice: If you're left wondering "what if" and you regret the decision, you might have bailed out too soon. However, if you're relieved to be liberated from the dream turned nightmare, you'll probably never look back in regret. In fact, you might just savor the failure as one less step to take on your journey toward success.

Envisioning your life's mission as a roadmap can help. My sister's might look like this:

• Choose your destinationdefine your goal. If you don't know where you're going, you're not likely to get there. "I want to be a children's writer." J.K. Rowling did it, so can you!

• Plot your course. What tools, skills, or knowledge will you need to accomplish your mission? "I need to take classes to learn how to write for children." Take a correspondence course, or an online course if finances or time are considerations.

• Keep your eyes on the road. What obstacles or barriers are preventing you from moving forward? How can you overcome them? "I don't have time to write." Make time by giving up an hour of television, or setting your alarm clock an hour earlier.

• Be willing to take detours. Sometimes we discover new avenues that lead us to our destination just as effectively as the path we know and love. "I'm having trouble finding a publisher." Try writing parenting pieces for a change, or consider self-publishing your collection of children's stories. Shake things up a bit.

• Enjoy the journey, potholes, detours and all. Sometimes the trip itself proves more enjoyable than the destination. Love what you do and do what you love. Success will follow.