Editors told Natalie Goldberg that they loved her memoir, The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth. But the title would have to go.

"They said you can't use the word failure in America," says Goldberg, a Zen Buddhist who has written 10 books.

"I love that title," she says. "I'm using it as a Zen term in a way. The great failure is also the great success. You're in the present moment; things aren't good or bad."

She hopes that the book gives readers the same thing that writing it gave her.

"There's a tremendous sense of vitality from telling the truth," she says. "That's what it has done for me. The next book will be The Great Spring, which is about the willingness to look at one's life honestly. 

"We're struggling with that right now in government. If we live in illusion, we cause a lot of suffering."

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Whether well-intended or absolute evil, the result of these actions has been a society of doom and gloomers, those who say, "I can't" without ever saying, "I'll try."

The objective is to appreciate the fact that our life is a process, a process made up of infinitesimal experiences and moments all fashioning us into who we are today. 

And if we continue to breathe, our missteps, errors and misunderstandings are absolutely necessary for growth.

You are a struggling entrepreneur and sometimes it feels like you are pushing a 3 ton boulder up a steep hill. Costs keep mounting and you are considering giving up. 

Well before you do, check out these 10 setbacks that Walt Disney had, some were financial nightmares that put him millions of dollars in the red: 

1) Walt formed his first animation company in Kansas City in 1921. He made a deal with a distribution company in New York, in which he would ship them his cartoons and get paid six months down the road. 

Flushed with success, he began to experiment with new storytelling techniques, his costs went up and then the distributor went bankrupt. 

He was forced to dissolve his company and at one point could not pay his rent and was surviving by eating dog food. 

2) Walt created a mildly successful cartoon character in 1926 called Oswald the Rabbit.

When he tried to negotiate with his distributor, Universal Studios, for better rates for each cartoon, he was informed that Universal had obtained ownership of the Oswald character and they had hired Disney's artists out from under him.

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10) The sentimental Pollyanna in 1960 made Walt cry at the studio screening but failed at the box office. Walt concluded that the title was off-putting for young boys. 

Walt was human, he suffered through many fits of anger and depression through his many trials. 

Yet he learned from each setback, and continued to take even bigger risks which combined with the wisdom that experiencing failure can provide, led to fabulous financial rewards.

Walt Disney has been a hero of mine since a report I did on him in 2nd grade.

During my "research" (I read two books on him at the school library) I found weird parallels between my life and his, two of which -- paper routes and the fact I came into this world just as he was leaving it -- allow me to feel close to what I know was a kindred spirit.

Whenever I receive that vital dose of inspiration just when I need it, I recognize it frequently comes from 'Uncle Walt.'

While I haven't had the same scale of failures/challenges in my life that he had -- neither have I had the same scale of victories. Walt is a perfect example of great risk equaling great reward.

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Because, really recently, right before The Bourne Identity, I hadn't been offered a movie in a year because The Legend Of Bagger Vance had come out and bombed and All The Pretty Horses had come out and bombed and the word on The Bourne Identity was that it was going to tank also, because we had pushed back the release date a couple of times. 

When, in fact, Universal had given us more money to go back and reshoot and pick up a couple of things that we needed and we were making the movie a lot better. 

So we were holding the movie for the right reasons, but the outward signals in the industry were: "Oh God, this is gonna suck!"

So nobody really called and gave me any job offers for quite some time. So I went and did a play in London.

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Caught in our peculiar modern nexus of prosperity and insolvency, easy credit and epidemic bankruptcy, you also get toxic messages from the culture about what achievement means.

It is no longer enough to make it; you must make it BIG.

Television has turned everything into a contest, from courtship to adoption. In a voyeuristic world, fame becomes a ubiquitous career goal.

You all will live longer than any generation in history, yet you were kicked into high gear earlier as well.

How exhausted you must be. Your college applications look like the resumes for midlevel executives.

To the members of the class of 2004: putting a stop to this treadmill is like disarmament.

Who dares to go first? A generation ago your parents, as a group, were known for wanting to give peace a chance in the world.

Somehow we have raised a group that wants only a little peace in their own frantic lives. 

But peace is not what you see in the immediate future, for the world, for this nation or for yourselves. Instead, what stretches before you looks like a version of "Survivor" in street clothes.

Find the job. Find the mate. Scale the ladder. Have the baby. Make the deal. Make the birthday cake. The gym, the Gap, the lover, the decor, the cuisine.

Who will win the contest? Perhaps it will be those of you brave enough to stop moving.

Give yourself this advantage. Begin to think in terms of a vision or dream. ///

Making more money may be a sensible goal, but it's not a dream. Put your finger on something that has personal significance. Look for an aim of such importance that it is worth pursuing even if you fail. 

Yes, failure. Having a dream includes the possibility of failing as you try to achieve it.

For this reason you may have long shied away from thining in terms of grand purposes. 

You may have relegated your dreams to the category of fantasy and congratulated yourself for being practical and tough-minded, or for having achieved some kind of Buddhist detachment.

The remarkably brave Katharine Butler Hathaway [right].. wrote this shortly before she died at age 52 : 

"I can't deny it or pretend it's not so, mine was a life of failure -- one thing after another -- like most lives... but that is all right, it is universal, it is the great human experience to fail."

We cannot read this as the self-pitying remark of one filled with regret if we consider what else she said about her life: 
 

"Oh, lucky heyond most human beings is the refined and well-brought-up person... who is bold and crazy enough to defy the almost overwhelming chorus of complacency and inertia and other people's ideas and to follow the single, fresh, living voice of his own destiny, which at the crucial moment speaks aloud to him and tells him to come on."

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"Our so-called 'failures' can be channeled as guiding streams (sometimes raging rivers) of opportunity and experience that so often enrich - widen and deepen - the risk-taking passage. 

"If we can just immerse ourselves in these unpredictable yet, ultimately, regenerative waters."

"Think of the times you have said, 'I can't write,' 'I can't paint'... Since this was not literally true, you were really saying: 'I can't meet some outside standard. I'm not acceptable as I am.'"

This kind of critical self-judging often relates to the idea of being a "failure" at doing something creative. Getting beyond or "bypassing" intellectual restrictions on our creativity can be a matter of shifting one's attitude.

Singer songwriter Jewel [left] once made the comment: "I have to be constantly learning; I have a very insatiable appetite. I feel if I'm not on the edge of failure, I'm probably not being challenged sufficiently."

For her, failure is not something to fear or shun, but a part of her journey.