Seth Godin blogged couple of days ago titled "Failure, success and neither"
It was so well said that I am compelled to quote it hear with all due credits.
The math is magical: you can pile up lots of failures and still keep rolling, but you only need one juicy success to build a career.
The killer is the category called 'neither'. If you spend your days avoiding failure by doing not much worth criticizing, you'll never have a shot at success. Avoiding the thing that's easy to survive keeps you from encountering the very thing you're after.
And yet we market and work and connect and create as if just one failure might be the end of us.
Beautiful!
This is also very true for the cost of inaction in Entrepreneurship.