If at first you don't succeed

This past week, I bumped into a woman who I hadn't seen in some time. She had lost a lot of weight and she attributed her weight loss to her weekly visits to a nutritionist in the neighborhood.
A number of years ago, she had also lost quite a number of pounds, which crept back on through the ensuing years.
She could have given up after gaining back the weight, and I was amazed at her perseverance as she adhered to the maxim, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."
It reminded me of one of the sentences in the Don't quit poem that I posted a while ago.
"And many a failure turns about

When he might have won had he stuck it out."
By virtue of her losing weight the first time around, albeit with limited long term results, she was able to persevere the second time, knowing full well that the results were achievable.
A few days ago, I heard a speaker relate an anecdote about the U.S. space agency. (Whether the story is true or not, I can't say for sure but there is a lesson to be learned) They spent hundreds of thousand of dollars in trying to develop a pen that could write in space, subject to the laws of gravity. When they met their Russian counterparts some time later, they asked them how they had solved the problem of writing in space. They answered simply, "We used a pencil."
The Americans could have been dejected for not thinking of such a solution. But, instead, they marketed the pens to the American public for a steep price with the enticement that these pens could be used to write in space. The novelty pens were snapped up and the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on research were nothing compared to the profit generated from the ad campaign.