What comes before success? Preparation, practice…and rejection. Here are some people who went on to do big things despite some early roadblocks.

The Country Singer

Rock and roll, at least in its early days, was inspired by equal parts country-and-western music and rhythm-and-blues music. The genre was just emerging in 1954, so when a young, Mississippi-born singer who considered himself more of a country guy, he went where country musicians went, both then and now: the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. The singer managed to land himself a spot performing at the famed venue, but after one show, he was told never to come back. One of the organizers even told him that he should go back to his day job of driving a truck. Later that year, the same singer didn’t pass his audition for the TV talent showcase Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, losing to Pat Boone. So did he go back to driving a truck? No—Elvis Presley did okay in the music business.

The Engineer

After earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the illustrious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this guy took a job as a senior product design engineer in Boston. But what he really wanted to be was a musician. So, over the course of several years in the early ‘70s, the engineer built a state-of-the-art recording studio in his basement and recorded a full album of demos of songs he’d written. (He was also an accomplished guitarist.) The engineer shopped the full album, which sounded almost as good as a professionally recorded and mixed album, was nevertheless rejected by every major music company. Undaunted, he sent it back to Epic Records for another look. They made him re-record only a few parts of his DIY record, which was released in 1976. The engineer was Tom Scholz, and he called the band Boston. The self-titled album went on to sell 25 million copies.

The Children’s Book Author

In 1976, a young illustrator sent a rough copy of his first children’s book, a fantastical story called The Giant Zlig, to a number of publishers for consideration. While most rejection letters are brief (little more than a “thank you for your submission, but no thanks”), one publisher took their time with the illustrator to go over the manuscript with the 17-year-old budding author, pointing out its flaws as well as its strengths. “The story is simple enough for a young audience, cute, and shows a grasp of the language much better than I would expect from one of today’s high school students.” However, the writer of the letter also finds it “too derivative of the Seuss works to be marketable.” While the author has written some books, it’s for some other works that he’s best known. The Giant Zlig was written by filmmaker and animator Tim Burton.