We've all heard a thousand, some mythical and some real. The overwhelming assault of success stories, I think, is one of the reasons young people are paralyzed with fear of action. It's really a fear of failure, because anyone starting anything (other than those charging in ignorantly), is aware that the odds are slim on any one venture being a great success.

The thing is, we as a generation have not been taught how to deal with failure. It gets worse, the cult of success stories occasionally does provide a story about failure, and it's always some catastrophic disaster that burns anyone in range of it. We need more stories about realistic failure, the learning failures you recover from and grow with.

Instead of showing kids one more example of great success they don't believe they can achieve, show them an example of someone who tried his best, did well some of the time, and failed in the end, but grew with the experience, went on to other things, and remained a positive successful person.

I suppose what I'm saying is... try to give them examples of "good" failures. Business failures where the people who failed didn't go to prison or retreat from society in shame, but failures they learned from. If you show the students that failures are normal and an essential part of getting to success, you'll do more for their self-esteem that if you parade another Zuckerberg case in front of them.