 On 26 January 1921, in the small town of Nagoya, Aichi, Japan, a baby boy was born to a family of subsistence farmers. This baby boy was called Akio Morita. Growing up in a remote Japanese village, most kids who were Akio's peers did not see the possibilities of becoming anything greater than the subsistence farmers and small-scale business owners their parents were. But Akio was different. He had the burning passion to become more than the soy sauce producers his parents were. Akio was the eldest child of his parents and his father, Kyuzaemon, trained him to take over the small family business. But Akio wanted more out of life. He found himself drawn to subjects like mathematics and physics in school. Akio's parents always enlisted his help in running their business from a young age. So while running errands for his folks, Akio made out time to study any material he could find on mathematics and physics. No one paid so much attention to this hobby of his. The conventional wisdom was that, as the first child, he would continue to run his princess business when they were old and this was non-negotiable. Akio attended elementary school, middle school and high school in the village. After the completion of his secondary school, he went on to attend the Osaka Imperial University where he studied physics. When he graduated, he was commissioned as a sublieutenant in the Second World War. Throughout his stint at the military, he never lost sight of his dream of making something meaningful out of his life. His ambition stayed with him until the end of the world. Determined to create something of his own, Akio found a radio repair shop in a bummed out Shirokia department store, Tokyo. He met his business partner called Ibuka while running his radio repair business and together deformed the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation with funding from Akio's father. As of 1946, when the business was started, it had a strength of 20 employees, despite the seemingly good beginning of the company, their initial project was a complete failure. Akio created a rice cooker that seemed to have great prospects in the global market but the euphoria of this invention was short-lived when consumers began to complain that it didn't cook their rice but bonded. What soon broke out about the inattitude of the company, the rice cookers were rejected by everyone and the money spent on manufacturing them became a waste. This was really unsettling for Akio and a huge setback, painful because he had expended a great deal of time and resources on the project. Akio resolved not to dwell on that fiasco. He continued to build other gadgets totally silencing the voice of discouragement in his head and soon his company found its fit. Today, the company is known worldwide as Sunny and is worth billions of dollars. Here's the thing about life. Every move we make has the likelihood of being fruitful or proving abortive. When building a career or taking on the challenges of life, we should do so bearing in mind that failure is inevitable. Miki Rooney said, you always pass failure on your way to success. There is no success story on earth without the individual's encounter with failure. Failure is proof that attempts are being made and when failure comes, we should take it in stride and move on. Ariana Huffington said, we need to accept that we won't always make the right decisions that we will screw up royally sometimes. Understanding that failure is not the opposite of success is part of success. Accepting failure doesn't mean accepting that one will not succeed, but admitting that a certain attempt did not work and that it's time to try an alternative approach. Truman Capote said, failure is the condiments that give success its flavor. Akio Morita became successful in life because he was discontented with mediocrity and because he cheated his failure as inevitable phases that will face success.