Success is a pretty big word which is usually defined as an accomplishment of a purpose. By sharing you that definition, I'm not trying to imply that it is something easy to achieve. I'm telling you that success is going to be something worth it.. As they say, "success is not final, failure is not fatal it is the courage to continue that counts" . As you may have guessed, this week's assembly theme is 'success through failure'.

Today, I'll be telling you a story. A story of a man who failed 1009 times until he became successful. A story of the man who brought the iconic KFC to life. The story of Herland Sanders.

In the year 1896, 6 years after Herland was born, his father passed away doubling the debt of his family who was struggling to survive. Herland's mother was forced to work leaving him behind with his younger siblings. At the age of 6, he began to cook for his siblings and take care of them. By the time he was 10, he got his very first job at a farm and got fired the next month. He'd also work as a railroad fireman and get fired, a streetcar conductor and get fired, an insurance salesman- and also get fired. He'd go from one job to the other only to be fired and rejected. However, this child did not know how to give up.

At the age of 40 he managed to secure a job to run a gas station in Kentucky. To earn an extra bunch of money, he began to cook for customers who'd stop by for a refill. 5 years later, he moved across the street and opened his very own restaurant which featured his special fried chicken.

Unluckily his dream didn't last long. WW2 began and his restaurant crumbled to dust. Knowing that his business was doomed he set off in his car to different restaurants and door steps and cooked his fried chicken to the owners. He was turned down 1009 times before his chicken recipe was accepted. You've heard it right, 1009 no's until one yes that changed his life forever. By the year 1964 Herland Sanders aged 74 had 600 franchises selling his trademark chicken.

If he gave up to find a job, if he didn't try harder, if he didn't dream big, if he didn't believe in himself…. These are all 'ifs' His story tells us to never stop trying, to never stop believing and to never give up., because the day will come. He pushed himself because no one else was going to do it for him. No matter how many times he fell, he stood up, taking one step at a time towards his dream and his success.

First off, I’d like to start by saying; I have failed more times than I’d like to admit. It’s highly likely that I’m not going to make it through this speech without getting tongue-tied at least once or twice. And if you’re anything like me, then you’ve also most likely failed many times over. I can’t say that I particularly enjoy failing, but failure, through its life-altering lessons, has made me into a better person than I was yesterday.

Failure, as much as it hurts, is an important part of life. I’d go as far as to say that in fact, failure is necessary. It’s only natural that a baby is going to fall down many times when it’s learning to walk, and a student is going to make many mistakes on their road to academic excellence.

Moving on, if I ask you right now to name one of the richest people in the world, chances are that more than 50% of you will name, Bill Gates. Of course, that comes as no surprise. But did you know that before Microsoft was born, Gates suffered an immense failure in business?

It didn’t discourage him from trying again though. He didn’t want to give up because the sheer notion of business intrigued him. He was cleverly able to put together a company that revolutionized the personal computing marketplace. And we all know just how successful that was for him.

Much like Bill Gates, there are many important lessons we can take away from a situation that doesn’t really go our way. I’ll outline four of these in my speech today.

The first important lesson gained from failure is experience.

What happens when we fail? When we go through something and can walk away with first-hand experience, it helps us to develop a deeper understanding for life.

The experience of failing at something is truly invaluable. It completely alters our frame-of-mind. It makes us reflect on the real nature of things and their importance in our lives, transforming and improving our future-selves.

Number two, failure brings with it important first-hand knowledge. Knowledge that can be harnessed in the future to overcome the very failure that inflicted so much pain in the first place. Nothing can replace the knowledge gained from failure.

When Thomas Edison famously failed nearly 10,000 times to create a commercially viable electric lightbulb, with each failure, he gained the knowledge of just one more avenue that didn’t work. It was the accumulated knowledge developed from nearly 10,000 failed attempts that ultimately led to his success.

Lesson #3: Resilience. Simple. The more we fail, the more resilient we become.

In order to achieve great success, we must know resilience. Because, if we think that we’re going to succeed on the first try, or even the first few tries, then we’re sure to set ourselves up for a far more painful failure.

The characteristic of resilience can help us in so many ways in life. Resilience helps to breed success by setting the game up to win. Gone are the lofty expectations that things will happen overnight, and in comes the expectations that true success will take an enormous amount of work and effort.

When we fail, we grow and mature as human beings. We reach deeper meanings and understandings about our lives and why we’re doing the things that we’re doing. This helps us to reflect and take things into perspective, developing meaning from painful situations.

So finally, one of the most important lessons failure leaves us with is growth!

Life is designed for us to grow and improve. From the very genetic fibres that make us into who we are as individual persons, into the fabric of society on a global scale, growth is a fundamental part of us. Without growth, we couldn’t improve life on every front.

Although failure to us symbolizes pain, and we’ll do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure, we have to realize that it’s okay to fail. When we realize the importance that failure has played in the lives of the most successful people, it’s far easier to reach this understanding.

Failure will take you on a journey that you might not want to go on. But, the reality of the situation is that those journeys will help to mould and shape you into a better person.

Recovering from failure becomes far more effortless with the knowledge and experience of that failure under our belts. And there’s simply no way forward in life without failure.

Like there is no light without the darkness, or happiness without the sad, how will we know when we have succeeded if we haven’t failed first? After all, it is through adversity we find our strength.

An author I greatly admire, Francis S. Fitzgerald once wrote; “never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat” Keep this in mind as I end my speech here hoping we have changed your outlook on failure and given you something to take home.